Pathway to SEO Success: Manhattan Style

Multiple Entry Points Into Your Website

What does SEO have to do with Manhattan?  It has a lot to do with Manhattan, in a metaphorical sense! Let's take a step back for a moment to get some context.

First, it's necessary to mention that there are more than 1,000,000 people who travel to Manhattan for work every day.  Furthermore, there are approximately 30 bridges and tunnels to use when entering the city. Even with 30 entry points, there is still a great deal of congestion and several bottlenecks that prevent travelers from arriving at their destination in a timely fashion.

Now imagine that, instead of 30 entry points into the city, there is only one. If that were the case, getting into and out of the city would be a total disaster. Everything would come to a grinding halt.  Businesses would fail and services would not be delivered. This would be a bad situation, to say the least.

This illustration may seem absurd, but it's exactly how many business owners manage their websites. In most cases, when you find a website in the SERPs for a given query, you end up entering into the website on the home page. Then, once you get on the website, you must rely on the site's internal navigation or site search to find what you're looking for. Ultimately, it works, but it is not an optimal experience for searchers or for the search engines.

Time is of the essence in today's world, and searchers need to get things done faster than ever before.  Search engines need to get things done in a timely manner as well, and, if your website is not providing the right experience, then you are missing an opportunity with both searchers and search engines. 

What is Query to URL Pairing ?

When a searcher runs a query, they are looking to get a question answered or to solve a problem. At the same time, the search engines are trying to serve up the most relevant content possible. Query to URL Pairing (QUP) is about matching targeted queries from the SERPs to the right webpage(s) on your site. The idea is to develop webpages that satisfy the intent of and answer the questions asked by searchers. Instead of pointing searchers to the home page of your website, you want to have them land on pages that are highly optimized to answer their questions and fulfill their intent.

Intent Matters When Matching Searcher to Content

Are you building multiple entry points into your website to satisfy the searcher’s intent? If not, you are missing an opportunity to satisfy the searcher. Also, you are missing an opportunity to build trust, and trust ultimately leads to repeat visits and better conversion rates.

Former Google employee Vanessa Fox, in her book, “Marketing in the Age of Google,” mentions five representative intentions that searchers reveal when searching for information. These intentions are drawn from research around information retrieval concepts.  These intentions should be incorporated into your content strategy when building out search campaigns.

Searcher Intentions:

• Navigational
• Commercial/Transactional
• Informational
• Pre-purchase Research
• Action

Navigational:  Navigational searches occur when the searcher is looking for something specific like a web property. Often the query consists of the website’s URL (“www.twitter.com”), the website’s brand (“Twitter”), or other similar designations (“Matt Cutts Twitter”).

Commercial/Transactional:  Commercial searches are typically related to making a purchase. In some cases, the searcher has already done her research, and she is ready to buy. In other cases, she may still be in the research process and looking for additional information to help her make the best possible decision. Some examples of commercial searches might be “buy Adidas Adizero rose 1.5 basketball shoes” or “best price on Ipad 2.”

Informational:  Informational searchers are in research mode. They are looking for an answer to a question or a solution to a problem. They are at various stages of the research process, and, in some instances, they may not know how to ask the right question to the Search Engines. Some examples of informational searches are “what’s the longest mountain range in the world”, or “how many national holidays are there in America.”

Pre-purchase Research:  Pre-purchase research is considered to be a subset of information queries.  Typically these types of searches support a decision that was already made by a searcher. In the informational stage, the searcher has narrowed down their decision to purchase a product or service, and now they are looking for the right conditions to make their purchase.

Action:  Action searchers are looking to engage in some sort of action. They may be looking to download something, or watch a video. This type of query is also considered a subset of informational searchers.

Matching Intent with Query to URL Pairing (QUP)

Ideally, you want to understand enough about your keyword set and visitors to understand the intent of their search. For instance, a query for “Adidas Millennium Falcon shoes,” means the searcher’s intent is probably in the Commercial or Prepurchase stage. If you serve up a page that is informational without a call to action, you may miss an opportunity to convert that visitor into a customer. Additionally, if that visitor lands on your home page, they may not be inclined to search again on your site to find the page that answers your query. QUP helps reduce the friction between searcher and desired content, and it will improve the overall results of your search marketing campaigns.

QUP Example

Marcie, who lives and works in New York, is an avid runner. It's one of her favorite things. She runs to and from work every day, and, on most days, she’ll go for an evening run in Central Park.  Well, on this day the unthinkable happens. While on her evening run home from work, she rips a hole in her favorite pair of running shoes. Fortunately, it happens only a block from home. It didn’t really come as a surprise to her because she knew that she would need a new pair of shoes soon.

Marcie weighs her loss and decides it’s time to buy a new pair of running shoes. As soon as she gets to her computer at home, she starts running searches in Google to help her make a smart decision on what shoes to buy. It’s been a long time since her last running shoe purchase, and she wants to see what the market has to offer. 

She runs her first query, which is “best running shoes for women.” This query falls into the informational stage of intent. Marcie is at the starting point of her search for the ideal pair of shoes, and she is hoping to find a webpage with unbiased information on the top running shoes for women. Based on the real world search results illustrated below, she doesn’t find any webpages with the information she seeks. Also, none of the pages she landed on offered a strong scent of information relevant to her query. She clicks through the first few sites above the fold and finds that none of the sites provide the information she’s looking for. She returns to Google to do another search.

SERP Results

 

Above are the top results that show up for the query "best running shoes for women." None of the SERP descriptions answer the query or show that the answer to the query is located on the resulting page. This is the first bruise to the searcher’s confidence and a missed opportunity for the site owners that show up for this query.

Marcie clicks on the first search result to validate her initial conclusion regarding the quality of the results for the query. The site she finds has little to do with “best running shoes for women,” and it looks too complicated to navigate through to find the answer she needs.

Top website for "best running shoes for women," fails to match the intent of the query with the content on the webpage.

Missed Opportunity for Top Positions in the SERPs

For the www.runnersworld.com illustration above, I called out the H1 tags and the URL because these are places you can add information to make your page more relevant in relationship to the query.  Ideally, www.runnersworld.com would have a page about the best running shoes for women. On that page, the URL, title tag, meta description, h1 tags and other elements would contain the targeted keyword phrase. This is not the case and, as a result, is a missed opportunity.

If www.runnersworld.com had offered a stronger scent of information for the query “best running shoes for women,” they would have had a better opportunity to convert this visitor. Consequently, because the scent of information was so weak, the buyer decided to do another search to find the information she needs. The content from the initial search was not well matched to the query.

Marcie continues her investigation. She eventually completes the Pre-purchase stage of her research and decides on the Onitsuka Tiger Ultimate 81 by Asics. Now that she’s found the right shoe to fit her needs, she’s ready to make a purchase. 

Marcie moves into the transactional stage of her research. She wants to find the best price and best terms before she makes her final decision. She returns to the search box and types in “womens Onitsuka Tiger Ultimate 81 by Asics.”

The SERP results page shows her several options to choose from. The first option, which is a direct link to an Amazon.com product page for the Onitsuka Tiger Ultimate 81, looks like a good option. There are also several options within the SERP’s shopping results to choose from, as well as additional options in the SERP’s traditional organic listings. The Query to URL pairing looks stronger for this search, and it looks as though Marcie will land on a page that is well matched to her query.

This is the essence of Query to URL Pairing (QUP). The idea is to manage the content on your webpage(s) so that they answer the primary question posed by the query they are optimized for. In conjunction with this idea of matching content to query, you want to make sure there are multiple entry points into your site. The various entry points should be developed based on the queries you hope to be found for. Furthermore, each entry point page should seek to answer the question being posed by the query, ultimately fulfilling the searcher’s intent.

Query to URL Pairing (QUP) is essential to building out successful Search Engine Optimization campaigns.  The better your webpages are at satisfying the searcher’s intent, the better it is for short term and long term success in the SERPs. Also, it is important that you not fall into the trap of directing all your traffic to your home page. The home page is important because it naturally attracts the majority of traffic, but neglecting to implement a QUP strategy could mean a loss of opportunity.

360Partners has developed best practices for QUP using deep keyword analysis to determine searcher intent. Also, methods are in place to help determine what core-level content should be matched with targeted queries, as well as the most effective way(s) to optimize that content. 

As the search engines continue to refine their results, it is no secret that quality and relevant content is high on the list of important factors for ranking webpages. Let 360Partners guide your search marketing campaign towards short term and long term success. Contact us today atSearchMarketing@360Partners.com  for an audit, and give your search marketing campaign the winning edge!

 

About the author: Sidney Nicholas is lead SEO Specialist for 360 Partners.  He has been actively running SEO campaigns since 2006. His marketing beliefs center around developing strategies that provide long term value to site owners and search engines.