So Vinny set up his photography site and figured people would run over and click on the photos and buy prints. Sounds good in theory but it doesn't work that way. Sometimes you have to point the user and tell them what to do on your site. If you check your internal search stats and see people typing in the same thing over and over this would tell you that you have a problem.
A few months back I was noticing the same search term in my search box. It was “Where is Vinnys photo” or “where is Vinnys Sunset Photo”. Needless to say Vinny had a problem or I should say a broken sales funnel. I did not guide the visitor through the site as well as I could be. Then I listened to a Smart Passive Income podcast where Pat explained about having a “Start Here” button.
I placed the start here button on Camerawe.com and now the user gets directed to the most popular page on my site which also starts the sales funnel. As you can see that section of the site gets 60% of my visitors. No one at all clicks on the buy prints. They are not coming to the site to buy prints but to look at photos. If they see a photo that strikes them they will pull out their credit card and buy. The best place for that to happen is by using the start here link in the navigation.
Sales have increased as well as people are browsing through more pages on the site. Traffic is up probably because my bounce rate went down by a large margin. Even though bounce rate is no longer as useful as it once was the search engines see that my bounce rate went down and the organic traffic has gone up.