Drive more page views from your best performing pages in organic search
Welcome to a new series of content To-do Today. This series will suggest one simple-to-implement and pain-free idea that, if relevant should improve your website, the way you work or even the world in general. Today is a tip for publishers of editorial content that should help you drive more page views from your best performing pages and sadly, often-ignored, pages.
The aim: reduce bounce rate of best performing pages and drive people into newer, more engaging content to increase page impressions and increasing the odds of them finding value and therefore returning to the site.
After the jump you can see how.
How:
1. Use your website’s analytics package to define your website’s top 20 landing or entry pages.
2. It’s likely that these top 20 pages make up the majority of your site’s referrals from search. Most sites I have worked on have seen as much as 90% of their search traffic come from just 20 or so well-performing pages.
3. Look at these pages. Are they recent? Are there old pages there? Older pages can often perform better in search because page life is often used as a quality metric in search algorithms*.
4. Look at those pages, are they ‘working hard’. Is that content still relevant and accurate? Does you site have a newer version of it? Is there more related content published recently? If so, there’s the opportunity to make these landing pages work harder.
Time to get editing: Add contextual links, highlight more recent content, focus on things that someone on the site might not see on the old page but may well appreciate. Drive them deeper in your environment. Generate more page views from them, help them explore great content, turn them into fans.
Did it work: Here’s how you assess if it worked…
* Anecdotal and potentially evolving due to the move to real-time search.
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