Having internal links from your home page to inside category pages (based on demographics or location) is a fundamental SEO strategy, but isn’t used well by most dating sites because they focus on the search engines, but not the visitors the search engines bring.
For example, Match.com gets half of the job done. They include links from their homepage (including “seniors online dating personals”) that lead to specific landing pages such as this:
http://www.match.com/online-dating/seniors/singles.html
But the problem is, once you land on one of these inside category pages, all of the profiles are the same as on every other page, and they don’t follow up with keywords in the page copy, title tag, or anywhere else in the source code.
This is a waste of a good strategy.
If I do a Google search on “seniors online dating personals” I see the Match.com sub-page comes up as the number one result!
So far so good…
But once they’ve attracted a senior who’s looking for an online dating site, and they completely drop the ball.
But, because the page I land on says nothing about seniors anywhere on the page (and in fact shows me the picture of 20-year old woman from Pearl City, Hawaii), it becomes a negative experience!
Even the search form on the page shows a default age range of 25-45…
Obviously, the links from the home page aren’t there for the site’s visitors, they’re there for the search engines only. But with a few tweaks, the landing pages themselves could serve as great entry points for various niches.
Marketers often make this mistake of trying to attract the search engines, but not thinking about the consequences.
I’d be interested in seeing the conversion rate of this page. My bet is that few visitors bother going any further, and – in fact – would be even more likely to avoid Match.com in the future based on this negative user experience…