The Sign: How People Find You at All

A sign turns a building into a business someone can find. Everyone understands that part, and nobody needs convincing to spend money on it.

Online, the equivalent is findability, and it differs in one way that matters. A building gets one sign, in one place, facing one street. A website can have as many as you are willing to build, and each one is a separate door, approached from a different direction, answering a different question.

In practice most sites end up with one. Everything points at the homepage, and the homepage is written for someone who already knows the company name and went looking for it. That is the right page for anyone who heard about you from a friend, and it is a reasonable thing to have built first. It just does not reach the group who have the problem you solve, have not heard of you, and are describing that problem into a search bar right now.

The answer is not a bigger homepage. It is more doors.

In practice that means a set of pages, often called pillar pages, each built around a real question someone asks before they know they need you. Someone with the problem searches the problem, lands on the page that takes it seriously, and works out along the way that the people who wrote it do this for a living. That page is a sign planted at a junction you were not previously standing at, and it keeps working without anyone tending it.

Which questions deserve a door is a judgement about your business rather than a technical exercise. The best source is the phone: the questions you answer over and over, and the ones people are slightly nervous to ask.

The building behind the sign has to make sense as well. If someone arrives and cannot tell where anything is, or has to work to get from a general question to the specific answer they came for, the sign did its job and the structure undid it. That structure is the quiet half of being found. Search engines reward it largely because people do.

The useful way to hold all this is that findability is not one lever pulled once. It is a decision to build several honest entry points, each aimed at a real person with a real question, and to make sure the path from any of them leads somewhere sensible. You can add doors over time, and each one keeps earning.

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The Digital Office series. Five jobs a website has to do, named after the parts of a building they resemble.

• Anchor: The rooms your website has
• The sign: how people find you at all
• The lobby: your homepage is a first impression
• The consultation: are we a fit?
• The receptionist: what happens after someone fills in your form
• The follow-through: the part that happens after