Your website will be appearing in Google for all sorts of long-tail search terms. For companies with many hundreds – if not thousands of blog posts, having non-optimised and non-current blog posts and old articles, this missing traffic can amount to hundreds of visitors.
36.4% of people searching in Google will click on the first result, and only 58.4% will look at results 4 onwards. An un-optimised page, even if it has the potential to rank well, will not do so unless some time is spent on it. Small on-page optimisations can see minor increases in Google search results, which will put you in the frame that a potential customer is likely to click on. The trick here is gradual improvement – otherwise what we’re discussing might take a lot of your time.
To ensure you’re doing your best to get these additional prospects and customers on your website, log into your Google Analytics profile and check out your top landing pages.
Select Landing Pages from the Content menu
Use the Advanced Segments button at the top of the page to filter your traffic down to just organic visits.
Select non-paid organic traffic from the Advanced Segments menu in Analytics
On your top landing page report, add a secondary dimension of ‘keywords’ so that you can see where your visitors are coming from.
Use the Secondary Segment menu to add Keywords into the table, to view each landing page with each keyword that sends traffic to it
Now you have this data, you can find the positions that you’re currently ranking for with these phrases. If there is scope for improvement in rankings, then there’s likely to be room for some on or off page SEO.
Now you’re got a couple of pages with some opportunity to improve, and the focus keywords you’ve got the best chance of ranking well for, it’s time to work out what’s actually possible to achieve.
You should now be able to identify the keywords where you are already performing well
Here’s a quick check list that you should run through each page with;
- Adequate keyword usage in the webpage
- Keyword usage within the page title
- Canonical URL usage to avoid duplicate penalties
- Keyword usage within image alternative text
- Keyword usage in URL
- Keyword usage within H1 and H2 tags
- Keyword usage within bold, emphasised and italics within the page content
More resources will follow! I hope this helps.
* Data from Optify, via http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2049695/Top-Google-Result-Gets-36.4-of-Clicks-Study