Six seconds to sale

⏲️Your homepage has six seconds to get someone to a page that makes money, and more!

Hello! You've arrived at What Actually Works 🤓

We break down the real strategies, decisions, and plays that actually move the needle in your marketing, and here it for today.


⏲️Your homepage has six seconds to get someone to a page that makes money

A lot of the sites we see obsess over homepage design. Hero image, tagline, brand colors.

Meanwhile, their highest-converting pages are buried three, four, or five clicks deep, and Google treats them like afterthoughts.

Here's the problem nobody says out loud: if your revenue pages aren't reachable within three clicks from the homepage, they're not getting crawled consistently, they're not accumulating internal link equity, and they're not ranking where they should.

Three clicks are the threshold. Not a suggestion.

Why it matters more than you think

Crawlers don't have infinite patience. The deeper a page sits in your architecture, the less frequently it gets crawled and the weaker its signals appear relative to shallower pages.

What this looks like in practice:

  • A product category page sitting behind a mega-menu that requires hover states to access
  • A high-converting landing page only linked from a blog post published 18 months ago
  • A service page reachable from the footer, and nowhere else

Each of these is a revenue page being starved of internal equity while your blog index gets crawled on repeat.

How to audit this fast

Pull your top 10 revenue pages. Run them through a crawl tool and check their crawl depth. SEMrush's Site Audit flags pages by depth so you can instantly see which revenue pages are sitting below the three-click threshold, and what's linking to them. You can try it free for 7 days

If the only paths to your money pages run through blog posts or footer links, your architecture is working against you. 

The fix isn't complicated

Add direct links from your homepage or primary navigation to your highest-priority commercial pages. Not hidden in a dropdown. Not buried in a resource hub. Visible, crawlable, and within three clicks.

Then recheck your internal link distribution. The pages closest to your homepage should be the ones closest to a conversion, not your most recent blog post.

A lot of the sites we see get this backwards. They build navigation for aesthetics and bury revenue pages in the process.

Fix the architecture first. Then worry about the content.


Partnership with Grapevine

📉 Consumers Are More Media-Savvy Than Ever. Here's What Still Converts.

Today's buyer knows the difference between a brand speaking for itself and a credible voice speaking independently. Ads from branded handles are easy to discount. 

A clinical pharmacist reviewing scrubs. A veterinarian recommending a supplement. A makeup artist breaking down an ingredient. That's harder to scroll past.

Grapevine works across some of the most trust-dependent categories - GLP-1s (Futurhealth), telehealth (Alloy), finserve (Better), and DTC (Fabletics, Particle for Men, Arrae) precisely because expert creator voice and publisher advertorial move audiences that branded creative can't.

  • Just Food for Dogs scaled Grapevine assets from 15% to 45% of paid media in 6 months
  • Madison Reed unlocked 20% efficiencies over Target CPA and 50% higher LTV
  • Mathnasium cut Meta CPL by 33% in under 30 days

The brands winning right now are running both creator whitelisting and publisher advertorial whitelisting at the same shop, as one fully managed service. 

No platform juggling. No separate agency relationships. Brief to launch, handled.

👉 Book a free strategy call for your first campaign strategy session - no commitment required.


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Thanks for being part of the WAW team 💃 We’d love to know if this was helpful so we can continue playing it smart with the right strategies.

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