Moving on from phrase performance let's take a look at page performance.

We've already established that, discounting navigation traffic, the home page is not going to be our biggest performer. Usually, that's because home pages don't have targeted, focused, rich content. They usually have brief, general, overview copy. That's okay; that's what a home page should have. But it also means that content-rich sub-pages are the ones that will get most of the search engine attention. Google Analytics can help us discover which sub-pages are performing best. We'll need to finagle our Analytics settings a bit. From Traffic Sources I'll stay with the Search Engines tab, but I need to make some adjustments. First, I'm going to display only non-paid traffic. I've purchased AdWords in the past and these paid visits will show up as search traffic. I don't want paid occurrences skewing my perspective on organic SEO so I'll use this link to filter them out. I'll also need to segment this list by "Landing Page." Now the list changes from 'phrases used' to the 'pages landed on.' This list tells me which pages are performing best in search results.

I'll also change the report to sort by bounce rate rather than total visits. I have to click it twice to get to a descending bounce rate list. I'm also going to make one other change. The top of this list is going to show many instances of 0% bounces. These are due to the fact that only one page was viewed--and many of these are the result of tracking URLs, internal site searches, and other unique features of our site. I'm going to exclude items containing URLs that indicate this activity. This will eliminate some of the noise, but not all of it. To get past this noise I'll have to scroll down the list until I start to see instances with more than one occurrence.

Here we go.... These pages were clicked in search engine results and had the lowest bounce rates, or to put it another way they were the "stickiest" sessions. Pages like "Estimating Website Budgets," "Ajax Website Designers," "Website Prototype Technical Specification," and many many more contribute to our best performing pages in terms of low bounce rates, number of sessions, unique visits, and time on site. These are the most meaningful results and instances of search engine success.

Notice again that these instances are spread out over many pages. In fact, this list of the top 500 pages represents just a third of all the instances that contributed to our search engine results. All these rare phrases are out performing the more popular phrases.   next >