A Mini-Case Study in IA Improvement with SEO

I often refer to Google Analytics as the place to be at 3 am, when you’re unable to sleep.  That’s when I, at least, really seem to have the time to dig deep into all of the wonderful information that can be found there.

One such example is when I found that my company website was actually bringing traffic in on the phrase “web maintenance agreement”.  So I then searched the phrase, and found that we were in the top 10 in Google.  It not necessarily a competitive phrase, but who knows, it might bring some business.

It really isn’t uncommon, I find, for our site to rank well on some long-tail key phrases. The thing is, I also often find that the bounce rate on that traffic is high, that the people who do stick around don’t look at that many pages, and hardly ever, ever fulfill a site goal.  In our case, our main site goal is for people to contact us.  Here’s the original page:

As you can see, it’s a simple article, just like the millions of other articles out there on the web.

But this is a great opportunity.  Our simple little page is attracting traffic. Now, with this Google Analytics information in hand, we can create a couple of doors off of this page, to really determine what this traffic means.

Notice in this next design how we’ve added a call-out on the right side asking users to self-select – am I this or am I that?

Now, after some time goes by, we can return to Google Analytics, and go to “Content”, “Top Content” – identify the page, and then click on “Navigation Summary”.  At that point, we can start to see how many people go one way or the other, or simply bounce off of the site.  But hopefully, we will be better understanding our user’s needs.  And if at the end of the day, a great many are still only seeking information, we’ve had the opportunity to be a good neighbor.