Posted on: 29/11/2010

Tags: SEM

Lead your robot down the right path

Designing your clients site for long term SEO success should be a standard feature of your pitch, however there is often one overlooked strategy which could give the site that extra kick up the rankings, paths and journeys.

As there is currently no method to specifically tell a search engine which market sector the site you are building is in, you can only influence it with metadata, content and links. At the home page, the search robot will make notes on your content and feel its way around trying to figure out whom the site is for and what the most important key phrases are.

Typically, most sites have 2-3 levels of navigation so the robot has to be guided through three pages until it’s found a page full of information outlining your clients product or service. This is fine and works well, the trouble is of course that this is the way everyone constructs their sites plus you’ve only had a limited time to really drive home to the robot the phrases you want it to remember.

This is where designing a well thought through path as part of the navigation function can really assist the sites rankings. It is far from straightforward because clearly you want to avoid the user having to click though ten pages to find the information they want.

Example:

Lets say one of the phrases you are trying to rank for is ‘mortgages low deposit’ which is a popular term on Google. Typically your site would have a nice big H1 link from the homepage to an internal pages named something like /low-deposit-mortgages-uk which contains a calculator and perhaps a contact form. This seems ok but by taking this approach you have limited the amount of time the robot has to really delve into the site.

A better approach would be to split out the page /low-deposit-mortgages-uk into three, taking a bit of information in each step and providing feedback so as to keep the user interested, here is an example of how this might work …

Step 1. User lands on the site’s homepage, Clicks H1 entitled “Need a mortgage but have a low deposit?”

Step 2. User enters the page /low-deposit-mortgage-step1. In this page you tell the user how helpful this company can be if they are in this situation and to proceed ask for a small bit of information, such as “How much deposit do you have” and/or “How much would you like to borrow?”.

Step 3. When the user has entered this information you can provide some feedback in the next page, /low-deposit-mortgage-step2, such as, “Great, based on that information we could help you secure a mortgage of £x with a deposit of £y” and now asks for a bit more information such as “To move onto the next step please enter your Name, Email and Phone Number”

Step 4. Now you have got the users details and they have landed on /low-deposit-mortgage-last-step, you can give some more feedback or even ask for a bit more information about their personal or financial circumstances since you’ve already saved the essential name and number in step 3.

Next steps

So, during the process above we’ve provided the user and the search engine a pleasant journey through the site and fulfilled our two main objectives, leaving the robot in no doubt as to the service being provided and capturing the clients details in order to make the sale.

Seems easy? Well mostly it is but you may have already picked up on a potential flaw in this process, submit buttons.

Search engines don’t index content behind submit buttons, so if the only way to proceed through the path above is to click a button it won’t work, yes you can add the pages manually into your sitemap but this will be of limited benefit as you can’t specify the path in a sitemap.

So, you need to be a bit smarter and here’s how. When you are building your journey pages in addition to the submit button also provide a text link to the next page called something like ‘Next mortgage step’ and keep it away from the button so the user doesn’t use it instead of the button. Naturally, you’ll need to code your pages to work when no data has been passed through but that is quite straightforward.

What happens if the search engine indexes the page at the third step instead of the first? This could happen but you can overcome this by having good internal and external links to the first page in the process.

Does it work? Yes it appears to, I recently set up a site this way with a very similar mortgage related phrase and the results have been excellent.