Tuning blog landing pages

Following on from my piece the other day about optimizing old posts, I wanted to talk a little about landing pages.

(Note: Yes I do well on searches for “Knickers” – thanks to this post from Gordie Rogers: Should you get your knickers in a twist over bounce rate. Sadly the bounce rate will always be high on that page – I don’t think the people searching for knickers are looking for what we’re offering here!)

Of course, you have special landing pages already for people coming to your site from Twitter, and for other special reasons. But there are also pages in your site which you didn’t design as a landing page, but which have become so. These are the pages that do well in search for you.

Let me give you an example. This site ranks number 4 in Google for the phrase “How does Clickbank work?” That brings me a lot of traffic, which makes that post a landing page, and a very important one for me.

The key to success here is knowing what people do once they hit your landing page. I use a suite called Performancing Metrics to do that. The basic option is free. PM allows you track people around your site – even in real time via the “Spy” section!

What I found with the Clickbank page was what you’d expect. Most people were arriving at the post, getting the information they were looking for, and heading straight back out!

This is common with information posts, and all you can do is try to optimize the page as much as you can, to persuade people to stick around.

In this example, I added a line that reads:

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I also changed the related posts at the bottom to try to tune in to what people searching for Clickbank, might be interested in.

In the month after I made the changes, the bounce rate came down, the number of actions per visit went up, as did the time on site. We’re not talking major improvements here – as a ballpark composite, maybe 10%. But because of the numbers involved, it has had a significant impact on page views, RSS readers and subscribers.

It’s boring and painstaking work, I call it “The science of blogging” but by gradually tuning your landing page posts, you’ll see the benefits over time. After all, you’ve already done the hard part, which is to get ranked well for the topic!

Do you do stuff like this? Anything I’ve missed?

You might find these interesting too:

1/ Billy Blogger and his 2010 objectives

2/ The difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 readers

3/ Using surveys on your blog