Designing a Page's Content Flow to Maximize SEO Opportunity - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Controlling and improving the flow of your on-site content can actually help your SEO. What's the best way to capitalize on the opportunity present in your page design? Rand covers the questions you need to ask (and answer) and the goals you should strive for in today's Whiteboard Friday.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about a designing a page's content flow to help with your SEO.

Now, unfortunately, somehow in the world of SEO tactics, this one has gotten left by the wayside. I think a lot of people in the SEO world are investing in things like content and solving searchers' problems and getting to the bottom of searcher intent. But unfortunately, the page design and the flow of the elements, the UI elements, the content elements that sit in a page is discarded or left aside. That's unfortunate because it can actually make a huge difference to your SEO.

Q: What needs to go on this page, in what order, with what placement?

So if we're asking ourselves like, "Well, what's the question here?" Well, it's what needs to go on this page. I'm trying to rank for "faster home Wi-Fi." Right now, Lifehacker and a bunch of other people are ranking in these results. It gets a ton of searches. I can drive a lot of revenue for my business if I can rank there. But what needs to go on this page in what order with what placement in order for me to perform the best that I possibly can? It turns out that sometimes great content gets buried in a poor page design and poor page flow. But if we want to answer this question, we actually have to ask some other ones. We need answers to at least these three:

A. What is the searcher in this case trying to accomplish?

When they enter "faster home Wi-Fi," what's the task that they want to get done?

B. Are there multiple intents behind this query, and which ones are most popular?

What's the popularity of those intents in what order? We need to know that so that we can design our flow around the most common ones first and the secondary and tertiary ones next.

C. What's the business goal of ranking? What are we trying to accomplish?

That's always going to have to be balanced out with what is the searcher trying to accomplish. Otherwise, in a lot of cases, there's no point in ranking at all. If we can't get our goals met, we should just rank for something else where we can.

Let's assume we've got some answers:

Let's assume that, in this case, we have some good answers to these questions so we can proceed. So pretty simple. If I search for "faster home Wi-Fi," what I want is usually it's going to be...

A. Faster download speed at home.

That's what the searcher is trying to accomplish. But there are multiple intents behind this. Sometimes the searcher is looking to do that..

B1. With their current ISP and their current equipment.

They want to know things they can optimize that don't cause them to spend money. Can they place their router in different places? Can they change out a cable? Do they need to put it in a different room? Do they need to move their computer? Is the problem something else that's interfering with their Wi-Fi in their home that they need to turn off? Those kinds of issues.

B2. With a new ISP.

Or can they get a new ISP? They might be looking for an ISP that can provide them with faster home internet in their area, and they want to know what's available, which is a very different intent than the first one.

B3. With current ISP but new equipment.

maybe they want to keep their ISP, but they are willing to upgrade to new equipment. So they're looking for what's the equipment that I could buy that would make the current ISP I have, which in many cases in the United States, sadly, there's only one ISP that can provide you with service in a lot of areas. So they can't change ISP, but they can change out their equipment.

C. Affiliate revenue with product referrals.

Let's assume that (C) is we know that what we're trying to accomplish is affiliate revenue from product referrals. So our business is basically we're going to send people to new routers or the Google Mesh Network home device, and we get affiliate revenue by passing folks off to those products and recommending them.

Now we can design a content flow.

Okay, fair enough. We now have enough to be able to take care of this design flow. The design flow can involve lots of things. There are a lot of things that could live on a page, everything from navigation to headline to the lead-in copy or the header image or body content, graphics, reference links, the footer, a sidebar potentially.

The elements that go in here are not actually what we're talking about today. We can have that conversation too. I want a headline that's going to tell people that I serve all of these different intents. I want to have a lead-in that has a potential to be the featured snippet in there. I want a header image that can rank in image results and be in the featured snippet panel. I'm going to want body content that serves all of these in the order that's most popular. I want graphics and visuals that suggest to people that I've done my research and I can provably show that the results that you get with this different equipment or this different ISP will be relevant to them.

But really, what we're talking about here is the flow that matters. The content itself, the problem is that it gets buried. What I see many times is folks will take a powerful visual or a powerful piece of content that's solving the searcher's query and they'll put it in a place on the page where it's hard to access or hard to find. So even though they've actually got great content, it is buried by the page's design.

5 big goals that matter.

The goals that matter here and the ones that you should be optimizing for when you're thinking about the design of this flow are:

1. How do I solve the searcher's task quickly and enjoyably?

So that's about user experience as well as the UI. I know that, for many people, they are going to want to see and, in fact, the result that's ranking up here on the top is Lifehacker's top 10 list for how to get your home Wi-Fi faster. They include things like upgrading your ISP, and here's a tool to see what's available in your area. They include maybe you need a better router, and here are the best ones. Maybe you need a different network or something that expands your network in your home, and here's a link out to those. So they're serving that purpose up front, up top.

2. Serve these multiple intents in the order of demand.

So if we can intuit that most people want to stick with their ISP, but are willing to change equipment, we can serve this one first (B3). We can serve this one second (B1), and we can serve the change out my ISP third (B2), which is actually the ideal fit in this scenario for us. That helps us

3. Optimize for the business goal without sacrificing one and two.

I would urge you to design generally with the searcher in mind and if you can fit in the business goal, that is ideal. Otherwise, what tends to happen is the business goal comes first, the searcher comes second, and you come tenth in the results.

4. If possible, try to claim the featured snippet and the visual image that go up there.

That means using the lead-in up at the top. It's usually the first paragraph or the first few lines of text in an ordered or unordered list, along with a header image or visual in order to capture that featured snippet. That's very powerful for search results that are still showing it.

5. Limit our bounce back to the SERP as much as possible.

In many cases, this means limiting some of the UI or design flow elements that hamper people from solving their problems or that annoy or dissuade them. So, for example, advertising that pops up or overlays that come up before I've gotten two-thirds of the way down the page really tend to hamper efforts, really tend to increase this bounce back to the SERP, the search engine call pogo-sticking and can harm your rankings dramatically. Design elements, design flows where the content that actually solves the problem is below an advertising block or below a promotional block, that also is very limiting.

So to the degree that we can control the design of our pages and optimize for that, we can actually take existing content that you might already have and improve its rankings without having to remake it, without needing new links, simply by improving the flow.

I hope we'll see lots of examples of those in the comments, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!