Entry and exit pages are those pages of your site where search engine (and
other) visitors arrive and leave your site respectively. As well as providing
information such as popular page performance and helping you identify the hot
spots of a website, this can also help to optimise the performance of an SEO
campaign. Most analytics packages and even raw logs provide this kind of data,
and by tracking them carefully you can determine a lot about the visitors you
do receive from search engines.
Actions And Reactions
Knowing how people act and react on your website is important to all areas
of your online business. In terms of SEO, you can determine how successful
an SEO campaign has been by monitoring the entry pages. You can also view details
of long term search results and by looking at visitor activity in this way
you can also go some way to determine how well targeted your keywords and your
page contents are.
Poor Targeting
If visitors are leaving your site on the same page they arrive on without
visiting other pages then this usually means they aren’t targeted enough. A
high bounce rate may mean that your keywords are targeted poorly or that your
page content isn’t targeted to those keywords and visitors. You can first experiment
by changing the page content, although always keep a copy of the original content
should you need to revert back to this at a later date.
Optimising Exit Pages
Any individual pages that are showing a high exit rate may also need optimising.
Check that all the links to the page work, ensure that the page elements load
quickly, and that the content is truly geared towards the topic you’ve promised
visitors. A visitor finds it particularly disappointing to be directed to a
page having been promised certain information, and then finding something completely
different. This can cause a high exit rate on that page. So too can slow loading
times because many users don’t have the patience to sit and wait for a page
to load.
Visitor Paths
Consider the path that visitors take. If they arrive on a particular page
that provides a lot of information but doesn’t directly sell a product or service
then you should ensure that the flow of visitors is such that they will navigate
around the site and find those direct sale pages. Leading visitors down the
most appropriate path is a skill, and not one that’s necessarily part of SEO,
but it will improve conversions and give your visitors what they want.
Entry And Exit Page Statistics
Entry and exit page statistics are sometimes overlooked for their more glamorous
counterparts such as search engine rankings. However, they provide important
information to the webmaster and to the marketer or SEO. High bounce rates
can indicate something is wrong with a specific page’s targeting while aimless
wandering around a site with no end conversion means that you need to improve
the flow of traffic and offer a direct route to sale somewhere prominent on
your website.
