Picture this, you have a webpage that is already live and optimised and driving organic traffic to your website. The initial reaction to this might naturally be, “great! let’s go optimise the next page!”
What if i told you you’re not finished yet?…
One of the most common mistakes in SEO is optimising a webpage and then considering the job done.
Great SEOs realise that this is just the begin of the optimisation process, the real win will come if nurtured and approached strategically over a period of time.
A Practical Guide to Advanced Webpage Optimisation
In this session I am going to run through what you can do to take an existing, well optimised (SEO) webpage and take it to the next level.
How it works and what benefits can/should I expect?
To help illustrate the process, how it works and the potential affects you can expect to achieve, we will use an example.
Meet our candidate: “ESSENTIAL OILS THAT YOUR LIVER WILL LOVE!” ; this is a 5 year old blog article written in 2012 that happens to be the seconded highest driver of organic traffic to our example website.
This is all fantastic and great, but the question we should really be asking ourselves is how can we get more from this page?
The Answer: through critical thinking and questioning there is still a lot more you can get from this page. If you haven’t read our 6 easy steps to effective content optimisation, go read this now! {INSERT LINK TO ARTICLE}
“I want more organic traffic”
For the SEOs out there, i’m going to dedicate the rest of this article to focus on advanced (actually very simple) SEO techniques that can help you grow organic traffic to your pages.
Below is a step by step guide to advanced seo content optimisation.
The following steps will help you achieve the same success for your own pages.
Step 1: Understanding Current SEO Performance and Exposure
So, we know our content/page is performing in SEO. Now we need to understand what, why and how this can be improved.
Where is the organic traffic coming from? (Google, Bing, Yahoo)
The first step in this process is to hestablish where the organic traffic is coming from. In this example i am focusing on Google, but of course you could easliy do the same thing for Bing using Bing Webmaster Tools.
The main thing we are doing here is establishing where the organic traffic is coming from and as a result, where we can find the information we need and what we are dealing with.
- Log into Google analytics and go to: Behaviour > Site Content > Landing Pages
- Identify the page you are looking to improve by clicking or filtering by page name
- Select the “Organic Traffic” segment and select the secondary dimension “source”. This will give you a breakdown of where the traffic is coming from and therefore what you need to analyse and optimise for.
The questions we should now investigate are: What search results are returned for each of these types of queries? Are there any specific considerations that we should be making in our SEO strategy to align with this? For example, video, image, location focus, featured articles, rich snippets etc.
The second part of the equation is pretty straight forward, but to understand this we need to know what keywords are driving people to our page.[
Historically we could have looked in Google Analytics to gain this information, but thanks to the switch over to HTTPS (secure search) this data is no longer available in GA (Yes, i am still bitter.)
What key phrases/search queries are people using to find our page?
In this instance (and probably most) our organic traffic is coming from Google. As a result we now need to establish what queries people are using to find us.
To do this we are going to use Google Search Console (aka Google Webmaster Tools.)
- Log into Google Search Console (if you haven’t got access to this, use the following guide to get set up)
- Select your appropriate site/property from the list.
- Navigate to: Search Traffic > Search Analytics
- Click on the “Date” filter and select the longest timeframe possible (90 days).
- Click on the “Pages” filter and use the “url is exactly” filter to select the specific page you wanting to look at.
- Click back on the “Query” filter and you will see all queries that have brough traffic to that page over the last 90 days.
- Select “Clicks”, “Impressions”, “Position” and “CTR” to display all available query data.
How to Use the Data to Identify Opportunities
By reviewing the query data in Google Search console, it soon becomes visible which queries you can improve visiblity (Position), have the most potential (Impressions) and might be able to get more bang for your buck (CTR).
Existing keyword targets
By analysing the data you can soon start to understand where you are positioned for certain keywords and phrases. Using the additional Impression data can help refine your focus and guide you on where work is required or where it might want to be refocussed.
New keyword opportunities
One of the most obvious ways to grow visibility and improve performance is to identify keywords and phases that you have visiblity but you know the page is not well optimised for.
Lets take a look at our example, in the screenshot above you can see we have visiblity for terms that include “repair”, “function”, “fatty liver” and “liver health”. Guess what, reviewing our page we notice these words aren’t even mentioned on page!
By updating the content to include these phrases and optimising key on-page elements, we now have a greater chance of improving visiblity and traffic.
Inspiration for new pages
In some situations having a page cover too broard a topic and therefore there might be the potential for introducing a new page to cover interst on a specific topic.
In our example, we recognised that there was also interest in “essential oils for gallbladder”which inspired us to consider creating content around this specific area.
What about terms that are already Position “1”? Is my work done?
Of course not, there is opportunity here also!
The difference being that your focus will be around improving click through rate rather than search listing position.
Improving SERP CTR
In this instance, the Page Title, Meta Description and rich snippets are your weapon of choice. Take a look at your organic listings and find ways in which these can be improved to help your search result stand out and get the click through.
Some suggestions on ways to improve SERP CTR:
- Craft a compelling description that entices your user and makes them want to learn more.
- Use strong call to actions.
- Look at other listings on the page for inspiration.
- Research and analyse Paid Search adverts to gain insights into the most effective.
- If available, leverage rich snippets to help distinguish your listings in the search results.
