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Knowing which pages are being found through search engines gives an excellent view of how well your strategy is working. Ideally, you will have several pages on your website that are receiving regular referrals from search engines, a combination of commercial pages that call on your website user to take action, as well as resources and blog pages that are highly relevant and provide excellent information and value to the reader.
Your benchmark for measuring this is one visit. It does not sound at all spectacular, but if a page is getting one visit, you know it is ranking well for a particular keyword or phrase.
If you have only been targeting your homepage or a specific group of landing pages, rather than your whole site, from an SEO perspective, then the number of pages you are ranking for and receiving traffic on will be very low. This tells you that your entire strategy needs to be refocused. SEO is a site-wide set of activities, not something you should be doing merely to deliver one page to a high Google ranking. Authoritative SEO voices, including Moz.com, argue that viewing the number of pages receiving visits is the best ‘long-tail’ measure of how successful an SEO campaign is.
Popular Landing Page Actions
When conducting page level analysis from an SEO perspective it pays to look at the landing pages that are most successful. You can then audit these pages and analyse why they are your most popular landing pages. If these pages are ones you have targeted, transpose your work across the rest of your site to broaden the number of landing pages you have. Aim to make each page on your site a potential high quality landing page and you will be on the right track.
Exit Page Analysis
Perhaps more importantly than discovering which your busiest landing pages are, you can also use Analytics software to track which are the most common exit pages on your site. If you find a diverse range of pages acting as the last one internet users see on your site, turn specifically to commercial pages that are supposed to be driving conversions.
What is it about these pages that make people leave, or perhaps more accurately, what is it that does not inspire them to go to another page or to answer your call to action? The following list could all be potential reasons, and you should investigate your site accordingly.
A combination of excellent information on the page but the lack of a call to action.
A poor call to action or thin information having used pages elsewhere on your site to direct traffic to a certain page.
If the page is not an “action page,” lack of internal links or direction to a call to action page could be responsible.
Bounce Rate
If you have a high bounce rate – one page visits to your site – you will see your popular landing pages and high volume exit pages are the same.
As we alluded to earlier, Google’s algorithms should mean that internet users are continually finding content that is more relevant to their search, which in turn should reduce bounce rates for all websites. It is still possible for a site to rank highly despite having uninspiring pages or content, however, so do not take it for granted that a high ranking automatically means your pages are good enough.
Time Spent on Site
Instead of a high percentage bounce rate, what you want to see is searchers who find you spending a reasonable amount of time on your site. The specific amount of time they spend will be specific to each site and depend on whether your product or service requires a lot of researching before making a decision from a consumer or business perspective.
At the same time, you might find that visitors are indeed spending a lot of time on your website, but that you are not making any sales. This would indicate that you have written engaging, interesting content, but that it does not go anywhere in terms of offering a call to action or inspiring a sale. When constructing your content, try to make at least one link per page go to something on your site that talks about what you do or that asks the customer to get in touch.
If you need help conducting page level analysis, are looking to reduce the bounce rate of certain pages, or simply want to improve your websites’ all-round SEO, Bough Digital can help. Get in touch now to discuss your needs.