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
-
Press Page Best Practices?
Hey Mozzers! I have a question that I haven't found a perfect answer to yet. The company I work for has built a press/awards/news article page and I'm trying to determine the best format to showcase the information in. (You can take a look at the page here: https://www.webpt.com/about/press Should I have our team copy and paste the press releases onto our site and rel canonical that post to the original article? Or would it be better to just have a short intro paragraph and then have a read full story link at the bottom of that paragraph. Final question--should I make these pages noindex, nofollow? Looking forward to hearing everyone's answers!
On-Page Optimization | | WebPT0 -
Finacial pages markup
I was wondering if there is away to use Schema for stock market pages?
On-Page Optimization | | ciznerguy0 -
Local Service Pages
We've all been here before if you do local. What type of content should go on a local service page when dealing with multiple service locations? You could: Describe Services List Local News Articles List staff in that location (although I would prefer in the staff page for that city) Testimonials from that location or service But what happens when you are describing something that needs no explanation. Or a medical procedure that requires no localization and altering the wording can actually cause legal problems if misstated. Matt Cuts recommends a few sentences to a paragraph to describe a service, but my experience hasn't found this to hold up locally. Any ideas or suggestions about how this could be remedied?
On-Page Optimization | | allenrocks0 -
Changing the url of a page
Hello. I would like to change the url of a page. It currently has very few inbound links. I would set up a 301 redirect to the new url. Is there anything else I should take into account before changing the url? Is there a downside to changing a url? Do inbound links carry the same value when a 301 redirect is involved? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
View all Page for Product Overview Pages
Hi everybody! We have an ecommerce site with product overview pages, where sometimes there are hundreds of products listed. Usually, we just display 30 and have a button where users can click to see 30 more - or all products listed at once. This is the overview page (as indexed in google): http://www.geschenkidee.ch/aussergewoehnliches.html
On-Page Optimization | | zeepartner
And this is the view-all page: http://www.geschenkidee.ch/aussergewoehnliches.html#all What should I do here? The product overview page will hardly generate more traffic by listing all products (because the overview page will rank for generic keywords, while the product keyword searches will be referred to the specific product pages themselves). I was originally thinking of using rel=canonical pointing to the view-all page. But this would just lead to longer load time. Should we just leave those overview pages or is there a best practice for how to deal with such pages? Thanks for your thoughts on this!0 -
Why a page with an On Page A grade has a less good rank than a page with a F grade?
Why a page with an On Page A grade is ranked 17 in Google when the home page with a F grade is ranked 9 ? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Amadeus_eBC0 -
Is On Page SEO Dead?
Hey Guys, Search Engine Roundtable has published a short post about this a few days ago, quoting senior member at WebmasterWorld forums who said: "The way I see it, on-page text today is for the "relevance" part of the total algorithm. The whole algorithm is, in broad strokes, "relevance + connectedness + quality". After you've clearly stated the relevance of the page, then the rest of your ranking power comes from elsewhere. I've added on-page bold tags with no effect. I've added or changed h1 elements with no effect. Not too long ago, those might well have done something, but that's not the game anymore. And moving from a table layout to a CSS-P layout today might get you nowhere, too. It all depends how deeply complicated the table layout was, I think." http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4408395.htm Is it true? Is on-page SEO really dead? What do you think?
On-Page Optimization | | ShivaS0