To Reduce (pages)... or not to Reduce?
-
Our site has a large Business Directory with millions of pages. For examples' sake, let's say it's a directory of Restaurants.
Each Restaurant has 4 pages on the site, each tied together through a row of tabs across the top of the page:
Tab 1 - Basic super 7 info - name, location, contact info
Tab 2 - Restaurant menu
Tab 3 - Restaurant reviews
Tab 4 - Photos of food
The Tab 1 page generates 95% of our traffic, and 90% of conversions.
The conversion rate on Tab 2 - Tab 4 pages is 6 - 10x greater than Tab 1 conversions.
Total Conversions from search queries on menus, reviews and food are 20% higher than are conversions resulting from searches on restaurant name & info alone.
We're working with a consultant on a redesign, who wants to consolidate the 4 pages into one.
Their advice is to focus on making a better page, featuring all of the content, sacrifice a little organic traffic but make up any losses by improving conversion.
My counterpoint is that we shouldn't scrap the Tab 2-4 pages just because they have lower traffic - we should make the pages BETTER. The content we display is thin, and we have plenty of data we could expose to make the pages more robust. By consolidating it will also be hard to optimize a page for people searching for name/location AND menu AND reviews AND photos. We're asking that one page to do too much, and it's likely we will see diminished search volume for queries on menu, reviews and food. I think the decline will be much more significant than the consultant estimates.
The consultant says there will be little change to organic traffic. since Tab 1 already generates 95% of traffic. Through basic math, they're saying the risk is a 5% decline in organic traffic. Further, they see little chance of queries for menu, reviews, and food declining because most of those queries tend to send people too the home page or Tab 1 page anyway.
Finally, the designer of the new wireframes admitted that potential organic traffic risks were not taken into consideration when they recommended consolidating the pages.
I sincerely appreciate your thoughts and consideration!
Trisha
-
It certainly seems like you've put much more effort into challenging any lazy assumptions (like a single page will inherently convert better) and I think your logic is sound. From what you describe it sounds like the listing UX is well-segmented according to the distinct types of search intent you know that you field from your visitors, and I'd be wary of trying to "fix" that if the navigability ain't broke. Especially if the single-page amalgamation puts any of your strong search intent content in a non-intuitive spot or, god-forbid, below the fold.
-
I am with you, if you can make the pages unique keep them. Dont go backwards when you can go forwards. You have established that the other pages convert better, it may be that they convert to sales better too. I have found long tails search queries, convert better to clicks and sales and are the cream of visits. If they convert to sales better by 10x, then that 5% is making 33% of your sales.
Make sure you demand what you think is best as many so called developers these days will do what easy for them. i have no idea what your circumstances are but many today make sites from ready made CMS solutions or templates, and expect you to fit to their limitations.
Listen to others, but in the end, no one loves your busibness or understands it like yourself
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
XML Sitemap After On Page Changes
Hi everyone, could anyone please help me understand what to do next with the xml sitemap after making on page changes? For example, a website has an already existing xml sitemap and it's submitted to Google search console. We make changes to the website - URL structure, content, added new pages, 301 redirected broken links etc. for optimisation. Is there anything that we should do to change/update their current xml sitemap? Does it automatically update itself? Do we have to resubmit their xml sitemap to search console? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | nhhernandez0 -
Area pages
As area pages are seen as trying to game google (see link below) is their a 'better way' to target multipe areas (100 odd)? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2721311?hl=en Cheers
On-Page Optimization | | webguru20140 -
301, Canonical, and Page Authority
I have been trying to find an answer to this question for awhile now but I am having trouble. I have a clients site that I need to redirect and Canonical the pages to correct duplicate content issues and title tags however, the issue with this client is that some of the www. pages have a higher PA than non-www and the reverse is true. I am wondering if there is an issue with chasing the PA to get the highest PA per page (even if this means the site is going to be a mix of www. and non-www. pages)? I am extremely new to SEO so I apologize ahead of time if I missed this in the forum.
On-Page Optimization | | Highline_Ideas0 -
On-page SEO optimization
hi there! Is it possible not to be in the first 20 or 30 positions in the SERPs after executing onpage SEO actions (keyword optimization, metatags, ....) even for keywords for which there's not "too much" competition? Is there a way of visualize the pages indexed by the google bot? (the pages especifically, not the number) in order to discard indexing problems? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr1 -
Too Many On-Page Links
Hi, I did a SEOmoz campaign and got results today, One of the results is Too "Many On-Page Links" when i am drilling down, i see that that's include inside links. for example, i sale food, i have my main department window - inside i have 30 products - each product is linked to a detailed page about the product. so automatically i have 30 links - not including all the others in this page, and i easily get over 100 and even sometimes 200 is this a big issue? does it damages my SEO? If yes, is there a way to write the HTML in a way that internal links like that wont be counted? Thank you SEOWiseUs
On-Page Optimization | | iivgi0 -
Links to Product pages
Hello all, I am still rather new to SEO and learning a lot every day. I do have a question. On our product search result pages (example http://shop.ferguson.com/search/bathroom-lighting)
On-Page Optimization | | Ferguson
It is currently set up so the image, text, price etc of a product is linking to that product page. Our question is, if we were to link the image and the product name - will this be seen as two links to the same page? Is this a bad thing having multiple links to the same page? I searched around to see how other ecommerce sites have similar pages setup and it seems they link the image and also the product name, and the description is not click-able, which allows a user to "Highlight" the text (this is not possible on ours) Which would be to correct approach for SEO as well as User Interface, the way we have it set up, or by going with the method of the question I asked, Thank you for any information on this! Nick0 -
On page internal link text
Hi, I'm in the process of rebuilding/designing an existing well ranking niche bespoke software site and have the following question - In the footer, I'm planning on linking to the main landing pages (blue widget software, red widget software etc theres about 7 in total). In these links I want to know if its best to have the word "software" in each link as I'm scared of it looking spamy. We sell custom software, and a lot of the keywords that currently attract traffic (as reported in analytics) end in the word software, for example - blue widget software red widget software In the footer would you end each link with software or not? How much effect would this have on rankings? Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | JamesJacobs0 -
Page Authority
I have recently optimised a set of images for a client of ours: I'm looking through all the PA of these newly optimised images, and have varying PA {from SEOmoz toolbar} I understand that internal linking will pass link juice, and obviously external links will add to the overall PA. I have several pages with a PA of 36: { Fairly deep pages} Yet they have no external or internal links going to them. My question is "How can a page gain any authority when it has no visible links pointing at it?" Obviously there must be a link pointing at it {internally} as Google wouldn't have crawled the page right? Also lets say all the keywords are of equal competitiveness would the keywords with highest PA rank higher than those on O PA pages. Many Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Yozzer0