SEO Friendly Page Structure That Will Define Your Audience

There are so many different considerations when building a new site: getting your branding and colour scheme right, creating a usable layout and navigation. These are all important, but there is one little chap who often gets completely overlooked. How you break up your information and content across pages will not only determine what type of visitors you attract, but will also have an impact on the time spent on your pages themselves, and therefore the success of your search engine optimisation (SEO) itself.
 

Understanding Your Audience Through Keywords

When I’m sat at home watching TV, the advertiser doesn’t know me from Geoff. I’m only here because the scheduled program was of some interest. Outside of this, potential advertisers know very little about me. This is where the Web is utterly different. Each visitor who lands on your page, came from somewhere. Think about it: If they came from a search engine, then we know their intentions will lie behind the search terms they entered into Google. If they followed a link, then it is likely they saw something on the referring site which led them to believe we can help them out. We already understand something about their desires and purpose and by applying just a little tracking data we might be able to better understand what really makes them tick.

Using Google Analytics to Guide Page Structure

So what does this have to do with page structure, SEO and how you break up your content? Well, I like to imagine each page as an island. While they may share a common purpose and phrases, each will deal with a slightly different topic and can therefore be used to target different searches. Each page needs to be targeted towards a particular audience. Lets suppose you are a plumber who performs everything from central heating to plumbing repair and boiler installation. It would be very tempting to lump a all this information together under a general page ’services’ which might include lists of statements.  By simply breaking up the different services across pages, and padding the content out with text you will have more room to optimise each page for variations on themes around their target optimisation phrases and this will allow you to deliver highly relevant content, which in turn will improve your bounce rate and therefore the success of your SEO as a whole.

Identifying Content That Works for Your SEO

Looking through your Google Analytic data for low bounce rate phrases people found you for will help you work out which visitors were receptive to your content after entering their search terms. You might refine the optimisation of each page to remove or rephrase terms that have a high bounce. One or two bounces is quite normal, but if you’ve had five or ten visits and have a bounce rate over 75%, this might be caused by optimised search terms that are either slightly ambiguous or perhaps a little vague. It might even be nothing wrong with the content itself, but simply the message includes too much information that is not relevant to your search visitor, who might wrongly conclude you could not satisfy their need because they simply didn’t read far enough down the page! If you add content to the site regularly, keeping track of your tracking data will also help you identify demand for a particular topic and allow you to pitch information you know will work.

Deciding When a New Page Will Help Your SEO

The questions to ask yourself are surprisingly straight forward: “What type of audience is this message aimed at?”, “What will this audience be looking for?” and “What sort of action do I wish to encourage from each type of visitor once they find this page?”. If you allow these questions to govern the structure of your site, you will never go far wrong. If content is king, then how you divide up your Kingdom will determine how effectively each page can work together and will improve the overall quality of your SEO.