Timothy Carter

Your product or service is worthless without a steady flow of people who are willing and able to buy it. In other words, you need leads. And you need lots of them…indefinitely. But it’s rare that you’ll engage with a customer who is ready to buy the first time they hear about your product. Typically, you have to let them gently slide down the sales funnel. And though a bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFL) lead is the most fun kind of lead, almost every BOFL starts as a TOFL, or top-of-the-funnel lead. By learning how to generate and manage these leads, you can accelerate your results. Quick Funnel Primer There seems to be a common misconception among business owners and entrepreneurs about what a lead is. You probably have a pretty decent idea of what actually constitutes a lead, but before we dig into lead generation too deeply, let’s clear the air. A random Facebook user who sees your post in their news feed is not a lead. The person driving by your store is not a lead. Your second cousin’s best friend is not a lead. Each of these people can become a lead…but they’re not leads simply because of proximity. A lead is someone who takes action and interacts with your brand in some capacity. The random Facebook user becomes a lead when he clicks on your post, visits your website, and downloads your ebook. The person driving by your store becomes a lead when she parks the car, enters the store, and begins talking to one of your salespeople. Your second cousin’s best friend becomes a lead when he picks up the phone and calls you to request a quote. In other words, awareness doesn’t make a lead. When someone engages with your business, they can officially be considered a lead. To further clarify this, let’s look at the classic marketing funnel. As you know, a marketing funnel starts with awareness and then moves through the states of interest and action before ultimately (hopefully) resulting in a sale. The problem is that most businesses assume someone becomes a lead in the awareness stage. And while you definitely need people to start in the awareness stage, these are not leads. They’re just people who know you exist. Many of these people will never become leads, no matter what you do. (Take your mother-in-law, for example. She knows your business exists, but she’s not ever going to buy anything from you. She’s not your target market!) The key to a successful marketing funnel is to make as many people aware of your business as possible, but to then identify and focus on the ones who slip into the second state: interest. It’s at the interest stage of the funnel that a person becomes a lead. This is a true TOFL. TL;DR: You need awareness in order to fill your funnel with potential customers, but a person only becomes a lead when they have a genuine interest. If you can start out with a lot of people who are interested, the rest of your funnel becomes more productive. 5 Tips for Generating Top-of-Funnel Leads Generating TOFL requires two parts: (1) Creating awareness, and (2) Qualifying which of the “aware” group is interested. Keeping this in mind, let’s explore a few tips for generating high-quality TOFL that can ultimately be converted into customers further down the funnel. 1. Create Valuable Content Content is your currency. In today’s online world, you need lots of quality content to generate awareness and nurture people into leads (and ultimately into customers). More specifically, you need content that adds actual value to the reader. Generic, salesy copy isn’t going to do much for you at the top of the funnel. You need to give away value so that people have something to sink their teeth into. Examples of high-value, actionable content include: How-to articles. Any piece of content that shows your ideal reader how to accomplish something is considered a value-add. If people walk away smarter or more capable than when they started reading, that’s a win. They’ll come back for more (and feel indebted to your brand for the value you’ve added). Research and data. Have you run a study, survey, or focus group and discovered interesting insights that your reader may find valuable? A report on this information can be an excellent on-ramp and trust-builder. This is more than just simple SEO keyword research. It involves in-depth articles that show the depth and breadth of your knowledge of the subject matter. Courses/webinars. Most businesses sell courses as products and/or use webinars to sell products. But you can create a ton of value by using these as pure education plays. People are so pre-conditioned to expect the hard sell at the end, that they’ll be pleasantly surprised when there’s no “sell.” (You can still offer a CTA, but keep it light.) The important thing to remember with content is that quality is always more important than quantity. You’re better off creating three to five exceptional pieces of content to feed your funnel than generating a dozen flimsy blog posts each week. 2. Expand Your Reach With Link Building Even with the best content, most brands struggle to reach enough people to fill their funnels. The key is to expand your reach. And if there’s one sure-fire, sustainable way to do this, it’s via link building. Link building is the process of acquiring inbound links to your website from authoritative publishers, websites, and domains. This can be done via any number of approaches, but is most effectively accomplished through guest blogging. 3. Go Live on Social With all of the noise that exists on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, it can be really difficult to cut through the junk and connect with people. If you’re pushing out traditional posts and nobody interacts with the content in the first 15 minutes, you’re going to struggle to gain traction. One of the top ways to rise above the social “riff-raff”

If you’re going to run and SEO campaign, chances are you’ll need someone to help you do it. As a business owner, you don’t have the time or resources to train yourself on the process of SEO, nor can you rely on some other random team member to shoulder the responsibilities. Instead, you’ll be faced with three main options: hire in house an in-house SEO expert, outsource your work with an external SEO agency, or come up with some kind of hybrid of the two, potentially leveraging independent contractors or consultants. In-house SEO experts can seem like the wisest choice, since there are both good and bad agencies out there (and good agencies tend to be expensive). But as you might imagine, there are pros and cons to in-house SEO agents, just like any other option. In-House SEO Advantages In-house SEOs can help your business in many ways: You’ll remain in full control of the internal hiring process at all times. The best SEO agencies will offer transparency to their clients, and strive to get direction and guidance from business owners. However, most agencies also have tried-and-true operations and practices that aren’t easily movable. An in-house SEO specialist guarantees you some level of transparency, and gives you near-full control over what strategies get implemented (and how). As long as you trust your expert, you’ll be in a good position. You’re guaranteed to have a representative fully immersed in your brand. An intimate knowledge of your brand is necessary to complete SEO work successfully. Ideally, you’ll be producing content, social media posts, and maintaining relationships with external sites throughout the entirety of your campaign, so if you’re using someone who lives and breathes your brand, you’ll have a greater chance at keeping everything consistent. This advantage is weakened if you also use contractors for your work. You can always outsource parts of the work. Using other contractors is also an inherent advantage of having an in-house SEO agent. Because agencies generally take on all SEO responsibilities at once, you don’t have many options when it comes to work orders. With an in-house agent, you can find other experts and contractors to bring on for portions of your SEO strategy. For example, you can mix and match a in house team of writers and link builders to suit your strategy best. In-house SEOs can collaborate with your in-house SEO team. The best enterprise SEO strategies involve the entire marketing teams—designers can make more appealing websites, developers can include more SEO-friendly architecture,web development and even an account SEO manager can help your social media and external link building efforts. Having an in-house SEO means hosting more SEO-related collaboration within your organization. You’ll benefit from cross-training. Your in-house expert might be able to take on some peripheral responsibilities, giving them a dual role, or might be able to impart some industry knowledge on another one of your in house team members. Either way, your in-house SEO team will improve through cross-training. In-House SEO Disadvantages There are also some serious disadvantages that come with in-house SEOs: You’ll probably end up spending more money. Agencies take a lot of flak for being expensive, but the reality is, most are inexpensive compared to the cost of hiring someone full-time. A full-time salary for an experienced guru could easily be more than $3,000 a month, while SEO agency costs for lower packages start below $1,000. Consider all the costs and benefits thoroughly before making a decision. It’s impossible to have one person who’s an expert in everything. SEO involves a lot of moving parts; you’ll have onsite SEO, content writing, social media, link buildings, and dozens of other small strategies making up your overall campaign. It’s impossible to hire an in-house agent who is an expert in everything. Compare that to an SEO agency, which deliberately hires individualized experts in each of those fields to rely on. There’s little accountability when something goes wrong. If your strategy doesn’t work with an in-house SEO specialist or many SEO specialists, you can fire him/her, but that doesn’t exactly help your position and there’s little accountability beyond that step. With an SEO agency depends, you can point out a lack of progress and force them to step up their game if they want to keep you as a client. You won’t be able to grow as quickly. It takes a lot of time for an in-house agent to ramp up a strategy from scratch. Agencies generally move quicker, with more resources and more experience to get the job done. Your strategy won’t be quick to evolve with the times. Agencies are serving a variety of clients and competing with other agencies. They have to stay well-versed in the latest search engine optimization (SEO) best practices if they want to stay alive. In-house SEOs, on the other hand, can easily sink into a habitual pattern of work that never grows or changes. There’s little incentive to change or adapt, which means your strategy could quickly become stagnant. Conclusion There’s no right or wrong answer to which enterprise SEO solution is right for your business. Every business is different, and every business owner will have unique priorities. If your ultimate priority is getting hard, measurable results and growing with the times, an SEO agency (or hybrid model) might be better. If you prefer to have more control, transparency, and brand immersion, there’s nothing that should stop you from hiring someone in-house. Weigh your options carefully, but don’t be afraid to trust your gut. If something doesn’t work out, you can always switch.

Are you confused by digital marketing strategies? As a business owner, you likely have heard you need a strong digital marketing strategy so often you’re pretty sure you’re caught in some sort of Groundhog Day type loop. Business experts emphasize digital marketing strategies because it’s true. Yes, providing your customers with quality services and products is essential, but even if you strive to do so, your business might still fail if you don’t market it properly. Digital marketing will help you do this right. This applies whether you run a large corporation or a small business. That’s a key word: properly. There’s no single digital marketing strategy that’s right for every business. While there are some general best practices that apply to virtually all businesses regardless of their industry or niche, the specific details of an effective marketing plan can vary on a case-by-case basis. You need to experiment with different digital marketing strategies to determine which is right for your goals. If you’re not sure how to get started, review the following examples. They describe strategies others have employed that may inspire you when developing your own digital marketing strategy. Educate or Entertain Content can be considered its own marketing strategy. In 1996, Bill Gates published the essay “Content is King.” It describes how the Internet has provided nearly all businesses with a platform through which they can provide an audience with content that either educates or entertains. Gates stated that this will be the primary way businesses reach customers in the future. His prediction was correct. Content marketing is now an essential component of a digital marketing strategy. In fact, content marketing could be the most important of all digital marketing strategies. Whether it’s through blogs, podcasts, videos, ebooks, social media posts, or online courses (although you should ideally be creating content for a variety of media and channels), you can attract new customers and maintain loyalty among existing customers by regularly offering valuable content. Without content marketing, your digital strategy will suffer. The way in which you implement your marketing strategy will simply depend on the nature of your business and brand. For example, if you run a law firm, you can publish informative blogs and videos with a professional tone that explains various legal topics that may be relevant to your customers. Every organization’s digital marketing strategy will differ, but is founded on the same principles. However, digital marketing content doesn’t always need to be educational. For some brands, content is more effective when it’s entertaining. That’s right, some businesses base their entire digital marketing strategy in humor and/or satire and it’s an effective marketing strategy. Consider the example of MoonPie. This century-old snack earned a lot of attention when the powers that be decided to hire someone to post weird, absurdly funny content on the brand’s Twitter account. By simply entertaining customers with short, exceptionally bizarre Tweets, the brand gained much more exposure than it was typically accustomed to. This is a great example of how odd humor can be one of your best digital marketing strategies. If you’re not sure which digital marketing strategy will work for your brand, connect with a digital marketing agency to work with a pro. Guest Blog Do you guest blog as part of your digital marketing strategy? A blog can be a very powerful digital marketing tool. Again, it gives you the opportunity to educate your audience, establishing your brand as authoritative in the process. The problem is, a blog that’s only published on your site has limited potential reach. That’s not ideal when your goal is to grow brand awareness. Digital marketing will help you grow brand awareness fast. Publishing a blog isn’t a marketing strategy by itself. Guest blogging will help you acquire backlinks to your blog, which will then help you rank better in the search engines. Along with posting blogs on your own site, reach out to the editors of relatively popular sites and digital publications in your niche. Ask if they accept guest submissions, niche edits or link insertions. Often, they will, allowing you to mention your business or link back to your site in lieu of direct payment. To get the most out of your digital marketing strategy, you have to think outside the box and be bold. Even if you don’t think a blog will accept your guest post it never hurts to ask. You might even be able to get a backlink to a landing page. Emphasize Sustainability One of the smartest (and easiest) ways to develop an effective marketing strategy is to research consumer attitudes. For example, research shows that sustainability is increasingly important to consumers. Many are eager to support businesses that strive to conserve resources and minimize their carbon footprints. If sustainability isn’t part of your digital marketing efforts, it should be included as soon as possible. Maintaining a socially responsible image is an effective marketing strategy that has worked well for thousands of brands. Look for ways you can boost sustainability at your business. Make the necessary changes, and promote them via all marketing platforms and channels you currently use, not just digital marketing channels. You can even apply for sustainability certifications to ensure customers aren’t skeptical of your claims. Emphasize Safety Digital channels aren’t the only places to market. In a post-Covid world, it’s more important than ever that business owners work hard to keep their properties as safe and germ-free as possible. In fact, emphasizing safety and following through are good marketing strategies to provide reassurance to your customers. Customers aren’t exactly crazy about visiting businesses that look about as clean as a dorm room at the end of the semester. Is your business one in which customers may visit brick-and-mortar locations? If so, make a sincere effort to promote their health and safety while on the premises. Just as you advertise your sustainability efforts with digital marketing, advertise this aspect of your business as well. Create Video Content Media is a huge

Here’s a perfect example of an overly-superfluous clickbait title: This Cute Puppy Shows This Homeless Veteran One Weird Trick for Weight Loss—and You Won’t Believe What Happens Next! While some have heralded clickbait headlines as a useful engagement style, most have harshly and vocally criticized it as tabloid-style sensationalism. Criticisms range from calling it gimmicky to insinuating that it’s responsible for the death of journalism, but no matter where you stand on the clickbait issue, clickbait still works. Clickbait continues to drive many of the eyeballs for Buzzfeed, Upworthy, and many other online media outlets (including many legitimate media sites). If it works for them, should you use clickbait as part of your SEO strategy? Does it harm your brand? The answers depend on your understanding of what clickbait is and how you use it. What is Clickbait & How it Evolved Rob Steffens from Bluleadz.com defines clickbait as content calculated to maximize reader clicks, attention, and shares By this definition, clickbait isn’t inherently misleading. It’s simply the art of enticing users to click. Unfortunately, clickbait is synonymous with unethical marketing thanks to the intentional disconnect between headline and article. sensationalized headline have always been around in some form—most notably on the cover of supermarket tabloid magazines—but it’s only within the past few years that they truly rose to prominence on the Internet. To understand how the phenomenon came to be, we must look at the two signature qualities that allow it to exist: the motivation to earn clicks by any means necessary, and the social element of viral ideas. The key motivation in most Internet-based schemes and gimmicks is to make money. So if clickbait is a way of making money, why has it only risen to prominence recently? Money-making schemes used to be all about getting money directly from web users, such as the infamous Nigerian prince scheme or weight loss pills. When the web was fairly new, these spam emails and flashing advertisements were everywhere—and they worked—but users and web authorities quickly became aware of the schemes. Spam filters and ad flags quickly got rid of the majority of these attempts, and user savvy avoided the rest of them. Today, it’s almost impossible to get direct money with these schemes. In order to make money, you have to get people to your site, and get them clicking as much as possible. “Clicks” are the new cash, so instead of doing whatever it takes to get your money, companies are doing whatever it takes to get your clicks. Clickbait evolved naturally. Consider the case of Upworthy, which has become one of the most notorious propagators of clickbait on the web. Their editors didn’t intentionally create gimmicky articles—instead, they used a straightforward mathematically testing process to figure out which type of headlines worked best for their shared material. It probably won’t shock you to learn that clickbait-style headlines just happened to perform the best, so they stuck. The second key environmental quality of clickbait is its propensity to be shared socially. The rise of social media encouraged the growth of this industry. Rather than having these articles naturally found by searchers or web browsers, companies could use similar tactics to get them shared thousands of times across the web, drastically increasing their reach. Facebook and Google United Recognizing clickbait as a new form of spam, both Google and Facebook (two of the web’s biggest authorities) have begun taking measures against it. Starting in 2011 with the Panda update, Google has gradually refined its ability to detect “high quality” content, eliminating any duplicate or unoriginal content (which is common in clickbait) and learning to recognize gimmicky headlines designed only to attract clicks. Now in the era of Panda 4.1, Google has all but eliminated the worst clickbait offenders from its search results. Stories published to Facebook (that include relevant links to your content) are ranked based on a multitude of factors, including how much time people spend reading the content after they click. When users click away and come right back to Facebook, the algorithm presumes the person isn’t interested in the content. Despite the slap-down from social media sites, clickbait continues to generate hordes of traffic for sites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy. In 2014 Facebook began cleaning up its newsfeeds, eliminating both organic posts and advertisements that were deemed to be “spammy” and allowing users more control over the types of posts they see. While the exact specifications of its quality analyses are not made public, there has been a significant decline in clickbait-style articles in most users’ newsfeeds. The combination of these efforts has led to a decline in the social shareability and overall visibility of these articles, throttling their potential impact. However, the association that clicks = money still remains. The Shift From Upworthy Marking a major shift in the clickbait trend, Upworthy hired a new editorial director to take over the company’s content operations. In a startling move, she immediately laid off several content “curators” responsible for generating this type of material, and hired replacements who serve as quality, talented writers. As one of the biggest clickbait authorities on the web, this could be a major sign that the combination of Google’s and Facebook’s efforts have finally convinced clickbait artists that it’s time to step up the quality of their work. How Long Does Clickbait Have Left? As with any major change in trend, it won’t happen all at once. You can expect to see clickbait articles (or “soft” clickbait) in your news feeds for several years to come. However, as Google and Facebook become even more adept at filtering out “bad” content and users become wise to clickbait schemes the same way they did Nigerian prince schemes, it’s only a matter of time before they’re gone for good. If I had to guess, I would suppose 2020 to be the last year of clickbait relevance (though a new form of “baiting” may emerge by that time). How to Take Advantage of the Shift Not

As difficult as it is to master the technical aspects of SEO, there’s arguably no more challenging piece to the puzzle than link building. There are no substitutes for the time and creative energy it takes to create content, building links, and drive authority and traffic back to your site. And for eCommerce business that want to experience steady and sustainable growth around their website, it’s important to understand the ins and outs of quality links building – the dos and don’ts, if you will. Link Building Tips and Best Practices If link building were all about purchasing power and ad spend, only large ecommerce websites like Amazon and Etsy would have success. But the fact that smaller ecommerce companies can find success in a crowded online world indicates that Quality links building has more to do with consistency, creativity, discipline, and intentionality. 1. Be Consistent With Content There can be no Quality links building without a commitment to content creation. If you want to funnel SEO “juice” back to your eCommerce website, there has to be regular content creation – both onsite and offsite. There’s no hard and fast rule that says you need to publish “X” number of blog posts per week, but there should be some weekly content creation. A handful of posts per week will eventually lead to a library of content that Google and other search engines will take seriously. Even just two pieces of new content per week will give you more than 100 linkable resources per year. 2. Create Sticky, Linkable Content Resources There’s a difference between consistency and quality – and you need both to excel in your link building efforts. It’s easy to say, “We’re going to publish a blog post every Monday and Friday.” But if the content is thin and irrelevant to your underlying marketing objectives, it’s essentially worthless. In order for content to be effective within the context of eCommerce link building, it needs to be sticky and linkable. When developing content, you need to put yourself in the shoes of bloggers, customers, social media users, and anyone else who will run across it. What are you doing to make people want to links back to your content, reference it, or encourage others to click? Examples of sticky content include: This roundup post by Neil Patel, which provides readers with 44 Must Read Resources on Content Marketing. People love resourceful, evergreen articles and are more likely to link back when there’s lots of value packed into a single URL. This Dollar Shave Club video is sort of the gold standard for sticky, viral content. And while not every ecommerce brands will be able to pull off the same brash, humorous approach, it does speak volumes of how well video can work in today’s social media environment. People love data and visuals. Bloggers, social media users, and website owners also love to share data and visuals. This makes infographics – such as this one from WebFX– highly effective for eCommerce link building. You’ll ultimately have to decide what sort of sticky content works for your ecommerce site, but these are a few good examples. In today’s world, boring doesn’t cut it. You need something to magnetize your audience. 3. Work With Influencers Not all backlinks are created equal. Running some sort of influencer program where authoritative bloggers and influential social media users are incentivized to link back to your website will take your strategy to the next level. Make a list of websites and individuals that (a) have sizeable audiences, and (b) have clout with your target market. Craft outreach emails or messages to engage the names on your list and build mutually beneficial relationships. 4. Guest Blog It can be challenging to convince bloggers and other digital media influencers to link back to your ecommerce website or content. They don’t always see much reciprocal value in it. Having said that, your best option may be to develop guest blogging relationships. With guest blogging, you write the content, plug in the building links, and give it to another blogger to publish on their platform. This gives them free content, while simultaneously providing you with valuable backlinks. Link Building Mistakes to Avoid As is the case with any element of SEO, myths, misnomers, and falsities abound. The internet is filled with self-proclaimed gurus who have the “secret sauce” to unlocking unlimited potential and growth. But in case you’re new to the world of SEO, here’s the only secret you need to know: There are no magic wands or five-minute tricks. True SEO success takes time and commitment. In addition to following the tips and best practices outlined above, it would be in your best interest to avoid making the following eCommerce link-building blunders. 1. Not Building Deep Links Naturally, everyone wants to build links to the homepage. And while it’s great to get these links, it’s also necessary to build links to the internal pages of your site. In link buildings lingo, these are referred to as “deep links.” For eCommerce website, category and sub-category pages are especially valuable real estate that you should be deep linking to. While it can be harder to pick up backlinks to these pages, it is possible. Any extra investment you make in this area will yield significant results. 2. Not Targeting High Authority Publishers Depending on the connections you currently have – and what sort of brand recognition you have in the industry – you may have to start small with your link building strategy. But understand that there’s a significant difference between the value that a high authority publisher and low authority publisher provide. DA is the search ranking score that those in the SEO industry use to grade or qualify websites and publishers. The scores range from 1 to 100, with higher scores indicating greater authority. As you develop your strategy, look to source backlinks from high DA partners. This will accelerate your efforts and enhance your eCommerce site’s SEO health. 3.

Site navigation seems like something you shouldn’t have to think about, but its importance to search engine optimization (SEO) is often underestimated. Your main goal is to present certain information to your customers, so it’s easy to get lost in thinking that it doesn’t matter how you structure that information. However, your site navigation plays a number of different roles in providing data to search engine crawlers and ensuring usability, therefore making it a crucial element for development in your SEO strategy. The term “site navigation” can actually refer to multiple components of a site. First, it usually refers to the main navigation bar on a given website, often found running across the top of the screen. It can also refer to the overall sitemap of the domain, including links not found in that header bar. Confusing things even further, “site navigation” can even refer to how easily a user can travel throughout your site and find the information s/he is seeking. To simplify things, in this article we’ll refer to site navigation as the overall structure and navigability of your website. The Importance of Sitemaps and Crawlers To understand the mechanics that dictate why site navigation links are important, we first have to understand crawlers. Google Search Console (GSC) can provide crawl stats on your site, letting you know areas that could use improvement. If you’ve been working in SEO for more than a month, you’re probably at least fleetingly aware that crawlers are automated indexing units that scour the web for structured data. Web crawlers, also called spiders, are bots that systematically scour the internet for content and download copies of web pages to add to a search engine’s index. How do search engine crawlers know where to find web pages? They start with a list of seed URLs, which can come from a variety of sources, including sitemaps. As each web page is crawled, the bot identifies all the hyperlinks on that page and adds them to the queue. Google, in particular, has several invisible crawlers constantly discovering new information on the Internet. Since crawlers consume resources on the systems they visit, some people block or limit their access. For example, people who don’t want their site crawled add special code to their robots.txt file to tell bots what they can and can’t index. Sometimes they block entire directories. However, blocking crawlers can prevent portions of your site from being indexed in Google. In order to generate the most relevant search results, search engines need to have a vast store of accurate, up-to-date information about the pages on the web. Crawlers ensure the legitimacy of this data, so if you stop crawlers from being able to do their job, you run the risk of having your pages left out of this massive store of information. On the other hand, if you can help crawlers do their job, you’ll maximize the number of pages they’re able to see on your site, and will thus maximize your presence in search engine indexes. To maximize crawler efficiency, first you need to make sure your website is free from Flash and JavaScript. These are old-style web formats that were once popular due to their flashy appearances, but their structure makes it almost impossible for crawlers to digest. It’s better to use more modern, crawlable schemes using XHTML and CSS. Building an XML sitemap is a must if you want crawlers to read your site in full. There are many free tools available that can help you build an XML sitemap, such as XML-Sitemaps.com, but it’s better if you put it in the hands of an experienced web developer. Once complete, you can upload your sitemap to Google Search Console (GSC) and place the file on your site, directly off the root. Having a properly formatted XML sitemap, in addition to maintaining a crawlable site, will ensure your pages are fully indexed. Site Depth The depth of your site is also an important factor for navigation. If you’re engaging in a content marketing strategy, “depth” might seem like a good thing. After all, the deeper your content goes, the more likely it is that you will be seen as an expert and that you’ll attract a wider audience as a result. However, “depth,” as it applies to websites, is actually a bad thing. The depth of a website is related to the complexity of links that lead to a certain point. For example, let’s say your website has 50 pages. The home page and nine other pages are immediately available on the top header. However, in order to access the remaining 40 pages, you need to click into one of those initial 10. The name of the game is K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid). Stick to “meat and potatoes” content. That’s why we only have two sitemaps, giving the crawlers less steps to get to the entirety of our site’s content. Some of those pages actually require a specific clicking order (such as Home > Products > Tables > Wooden Tables) in order to be reached. This is considered a “deep” site. Shallow sites, on the other hand, offer multiple pathways to each page. Instead of mandating a directional flow like the example above, a shallow site would have many pages pointing to each page in the hierarchy (Products, Wooden Tables, etc.). Shallow sites and a simple sitemap make it easier for users to find what they are looking for, and as a result, shallow sites get a small boost in domain authority. Restructuring your site to avoid unnecessary depth can give you more authority and more ranking power. You might be wondering if you should just link more pages in your main menu. Although this would certainly make your content easily accessible to crawlers, it will create a frustrating user experience. Your main menu should only give visitors the most important links. Having too many choices and multiple sub menus can make people bounce. Create a text sitemap for your visitors