Last week, as I was doing my daily/weekly reading to keep up with industry news and best practices, I came across a post from Search Engine Journal called “Google Ranks Webpages, Not Websites”. The article gets pretty specific, even saying: “Google treats every webpage that its robots crawl and index like its own little self-contained world of content, code, and links.”
This has long been the approach to optimization taken at SBN Marketing. We don’t want your homepage to be found for everything. That just leads visitors to have to search within your site for what they want. That leads to a higher rate of abandonment and/or a higher bounce rate, neither of which is good for ranking well organically.
Instead, we optimize each page to be found for its own topic/keyword. Whatever page is indexed for a particular search query, we want that page to be about THAT topic. We want searchers to find the information they want on that first click so that they’re more likely to contact you and less likely to need to continue searching.
In order to make this work, though, a website’s design has to play along. Single-page designs do not do well for this tactic, nor do layouts with multiple topics on one page, even if the site itself has multiple pages.
Let’s break this into a real-world example. Let’s say you own an HVAC company. Rather than choose a single-page layout or a layout that puts everything AC-related on one page, everything heat related on one page, and everything preventative maintenance on one page, your site structure should look a bit like this:
- Home
- About
- Air Conditioning
- AC Installation
- AC Repair
- Heating
- Heating Installation
- Heating Repair
- Preventative Maintenance
- Contact
This level of breakdown lets you target potential customers at every level of the buying funnel, no matter how they get to your site. In addition, it breaks the information down for the search engines so they can properly index your site to better match to queries, increasing your opportunity for conversions into sales.
If you need help with your site’s optimization, use the button below to give us a shout and we’ll see if we’re the right fit! And while we’re not in the business of website design, we do know how design affects SEO results. As such, we work with clients’ website designers daily to set them up for success from the start!
Hope to hear from you soon!
Image by 200 Degrees from Pixabay