So you’re checking your website statistics you notice that a bulk of the traffic isn’t coming from your index page, but instead your ‘about us’ page or your ’site map’ or even your ‘terms and conditions’ page…
Before I go too much further, I just want to cover a very quick, but crucial point – website statistics. If you place any importance on your website whatsoever, you’ll have some form of statistics package setup (most hosts will provide this as part of your hosting package, but if not there are many free analytics tools available for you to use). Better yet, even if you do have statistics, I’d recommend setting-up a Google Webmaster Central account because you can learn a lot about your site from the tools they provide. Now that I’ve covered that point, lets get back to the article…
You’ve just discovered that your internal pages (eg. ‘about us’, ‘contact us’, ’sitemap’, ‘terms & conditions’ etc. etc.) are ranking better than your main index page. Why is this happening?
It could be caused by a poor internal navigation structure, a lack of quality content on your index page, over optimising a particular keyword / keyphrase on your index page or it could just be that your site is reasonably new and Google is still working-out which pages should be more authoritative than others. Aaron Wall from SEObook goes into more detail about some of these issues in his post on Wrong Page Ranking at the Top of Google’s Search Results.
So what can you do to fix these issues?
- Check that the index page doesn’t have any issues (such as keyword stuffing)
- Make sure your pages have an easy-to-follow navigation structure in place. For usability, it’s a good idea to include a text-menu in the footer of your site. It also helps to include a sitemap if you don’t already have one.
- If your index is simply a splash page with some images and a few links to your other pages – add some content to it. Statistics show that if a user has to click more than 3 times to find the information they’re looking for, they’re likely to go elsewhere. So make sure you put as much useful information on your index page as possible to keep your prospective clients interested.
- Start building some high quality inbound links to your site.
Once you’ve made sure that all the above points are covered, you can start to better optimise all the other pages within your site. Have a read of Search Engine Land’s article on The SEO of Everyday Pages.
If you’re running a blog and find that a few select posts seem to generate a lot of traffic, maximise on this by promoting your RSS feeds to turn these once-off visitors into subscribers. You can also add links to similar / related posts to keep the readers attention and prevent them from clicking-away after they finish reading your article. Darren Rowse from ProBlogger goes into more detail on how to do this in his post – Stickify Your Blog.
If you keep adding high quality content to your website, you’ll find there will be endless opportunities to further maximise your sites traffic and links. Just keep an eye on your statistics and constantly test-and-measure different ideas to see which ones generate the best results for your business.
0 Responses to “How to make the most of misguided traffic”