Think Pages Not Sites

In a recent email that we received, the person spoke about how they had received 1000 visitors to their review site but complained their conversions were terrible. They were wondering what they should do next.

I immediately suspected that this person was giving me stats for his whole site and not for any specific individual page. Those 1000 total site visitors are more than likely going to all sorts of different pages on the site. Some may be going to the home page, some to article pages, some to the About Us page, some to a review page and so on.

What I really wanted to know was how many people were actually landing on his review pages because those are the pages that are the real money making pages. Now, if only 100 people a month out of the 1000 are going to a review page then you can see how different this scenario becomes….100 visitors would equate to maybe 1 or 2 sales a month. Nowhere near enough sales to give up your day job.

There is a tendency for people with websites to look at them as a complete entity when doing any sort of analysis. In fact, most people focus on their site as whole in most respects and neglect their individual pages completely. They keep adding page after page of content but each page becomes lost and forgotten as more and more content is added.

Don’t get me wrong, we all need to add content to our sites on a regular basis because Google likes fresh content, but one of the most important things we need to do if we want to see some level of success, is to really focus in on just a few of those pages.

When you delve into your stats and look at them in terms of your site as a whole, you get a skewed view of how your site is actually performing. So instead of looking at the total number of visitors to your site, look at the total number of visitors to your most important pages. These pages are often your money making pages, like review pages, sales pages, product pages and so on. Important pages can also include the home page and portal pages which direct people through to your sales pages. In other words, you are looking to focus on pages that are likely to convert to a sale.

It was our very first mentor,  James Martell who told us to ‘think pages, not sites’ and  this is exactly what we do.  We only look at the important pages when checking our stats. This is why it is often so difficult for us to answer questions like, ‘how much traffic did you lose in the last Google update?’, because to answer this we would have to actually go in and check each page. Something we would rather not do as it is a time wasting exercise in our view. We know if we have been hit, when we see our income goes down.

Thinking about individual pages instead of thinking about your site as a whole forces you to focus on your goal….and focusing is where the magic happens!

So, the goal with all of this is to find those pages on your site that have the potential to make you  money.  Now, if you are anything like us, there may be hundreds of pages on your site that can potentially make you money and this is where many people come unstuck. The more pages you have and the more sites you have, the more difficult it becomes to focus on just one single website and even more difficult to only focus on a couple of pages.

We know that feeling well. We have over 25 sites and even though we have our plan in place we still find that every now and then something happens (someone leaves a comment or we are updating plugins) and we will suddenly be working on a site we shouldn’t be. The thing is, that all of our sites have the potential to do extremely well and this keeps us wanting to work on them. But we know that ultimately this doesn’t work because we are then spreading ourselves too thin. When this happens, we stop and have a quick discussion to remind ourselves that we need to stick to the plan and we get back on track again.

When we are doing things the right way, we only focus on one site. And when we focus on only one site, we pick a couple of pages from that site (usually two review pages) and concentrate on those plus the home page only. So that’s three pages in total. We also add regular content  to keep Google happy. Usually this is in the form of how-to articles and similar but it is generally only one article a week.

In a nutshell, those two pages, plus the home page, now become our focus for that site. Now you might be wondering what focusing on those pages actually entails. Here’s the basics:

1. Backlinking

This is where we spend the majority of the time when focusing on our pages. We backlink to the two review pages and the home page.  This usually means sending out  guest articles that include three links: two links to a review page and one link to the home page. However, because Google are getting pretty picky, we mix up the links and will randomly link to other pages on our site every now and then.

2. Reworking the Content

We will look at each of the pages that we are focusing on and determine whether they can be reworked. This usually involves doing more research on the product to create a more helpful review or it might include removing content that is unnecessary. We want the review to be the best it can possibly be because ultimately it is the quality of the review  that will affect our conversion rate. The better the review, the better the sales.

A lot of people often  fear making changes to a page because they are worried that as soon as they do their ranking might change in Google. Yes, this can happen but personally we haven’t really noticed any major ranking changes when we have changed the content on a page. However, just to be sure, we take a look at the page and if it is getting traffic and sales that we are happy with, then we don’t touch the page. If instead it is getting traffic but not many sales then we change it.  There is no point having a ton of traffic to a page if the sales aren’t there.

3. Add Helpful Content

Adding regular helpful, good quality content is useful for a number of reasons:

• it increases traffic
• it keeps Google happy
• it keeps your readers happy
• other sites may link to it

You can add as much content as you like to your site. The more you add the better but you don’t want to go crazy with it because firstly you can quickly burn yourself out and secondly you could also run out of ideas really quickly. Go for quality rather than quantity. Notice on this site for instance, that we only add content once or twice a month. The reason for that is we’d rather write something of value than write something just because we feel we have to.

That’s it!

That’s all we really do with our sites. Sure, we might play around with them every now and then and change the themes, create new headers, find new plugins to upload or fix broken links, but the majority of our time with our niche sites is spent on those three things.

It’s all about where you put your focus and we’ve said it time and time again, that working on too much at the one time just doesn’t work.

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