How Do I Separate Pages Between Branding and Conversion?

I was asked a great question, and it’s something I talk to clients about all the time:

“Do all pages have to do all things?

Blog posts and information pages (product builder pages) are probably meant to be informative, not conversion tools. They bring traffic to build a subscribed audience, and you can remarket using Meta and Google, etc. Product pages for sales conversions are not meant to always rank in search engines unless you are a manufacturer and there is no better option than a category page.

There are always exceptions to the rules, such as a comparison blog post that helps with a lead funnel, or a “how to” guide that shares a supplement or missing component to complete the solution, and a product page where the question is about a specific product like [size 11 (insert brand) running shoe]. But that’s different, it’s not a common strategy.

The way to use the traffic that should be received, the pages that should be converted, and the pages of both is to separate the purpose of the pages into a document and try not to exceed the limits by making the page conversion rate. Focus your time on converting pages that are meant to convert, and provide the best experience for those that are meant to be branded. This will make your life easier and give your website a better chance to grow in both traffic and revenue. It also allows the CRO team to do their work while you do yours. The goal is to learn how to collaborate with CRO and other teams.

In this post, I combine product building with traffic-generating pages (ie, SEO) for simplicity. Concepts apply to both.

CRO and SEO Need to Work Together

The goal of conversion rate optimization (CRO) is to help a person perform a specific action, which can be adding a product to the cart, joining a newsletter or SMS list, subscribing to a service or publication, taking a specific action such as adding products to the shopping cart, increasing page views, etc. Although SEO and CRO can work together, they are not necessarily the same as SEO or regular SEO or CRO, they are not just the same as SEO or SEO. SEO does not need to know CRO.

CRO strategies can include:

• Removes copy blocks.
• Ranking the page down with the video and submitting some necessary SEO features.
• To strengthen the product in the headings compared to the headings of the section of the page.
• Pushing videos down the page so that photos, reviews, testimonials, etc., can be there though this stops the SEO performance of the video.
• Setting up split tests on live pages without checking canonical tags, meta robots, etc.

These are all things a CRO can and will do to help convert more traffic to a page, although it can stop pages from performing well in both SEO and AIO/GEO. That is why educating and working with the CRO team to ensure that it does not affect important content, such as schema, internal links, site design, positioning of certain elements, is important. How you approach a situation and how you can act versus react.

Pro tip: One thing that helps me when we get into a debate is to remind the CRO that without traffic from SEO, there are no users to convert and we’re both out of a job.

How to Stop CRO and Marketing from Hurting SEO

The first thing we do with non-CRO clients, who are more “product” focused than marketing, is to create a help guide that includes:

• SEO and AIO/GEO best practices for page types such as product, blog post, guide or comparison, listicle, homepage, and category pages.
• Map pages or folders with 100% discount on CRO limits.
• The SEO guide for simple techniques to common CRO tasks, such as split test designs that won’t impact SEO so they can run their tests and continue to thrive.

The goal, especially at the business level, is to have something quick and easy for other parties to understand and refer to. If it gets too long or too complicated, it will get noticed, and your job becomes more difficult.

Page Type Guidelines

While we all want our wish list to be on pages that are optimized for conversion, not all items are important. Include high-quality must-haves on the pages. If it’s a direction, your SEO must-haves can include:

• Certain keywords in section headings such as “tools you will need” in a bulleted list and “steps to do XYZ” in a numbered list.
• How to Create a schema (downloaded from Google for mobile, but can be used elsewhere on mobile)
• There are no sales pitches in the opening or sections about the company, since the aim is to provide a solution, then we can share offering something or a product and service.

Section pages on an ecommerce site may need copy, breadcrumbs, and FAQs if applicable. And a blog can be limited to self-service, such as a company picnic or a temporary promotion versus the evergreen solution that buyers always ask about.

Pro tip: If you say the blog can’t have X type of content, make sure you provide an alternative to prevent backtracking. Being proactive with solutions makes it easy to prevent personalized content from influencing the educational content that needs to be ranked.

Unlimited Folders and Pages

One of the most important things we do with the CRO and marketing teams is create a site structure where we have our “SEO” or traffic content. There may be two or three blogs on a website, one for SEO, one for company updates and product releases, and one for support and help. Two non-traffic generators can be fair game, and you have IT or you can block them in robots.txt or use meta robots noindex, track them.

Affiliate-designed landing pages with statistics and information used for backlink acquisition, or old but authoritative pages, may be listed as disallowed. Create a document or sheet with these pages and add a quick blurb on why they can’t be changed without SEO permission. A short bulleted list of potential negatives (in plain English) that could occur if a fix is ​​made can help inform the decision maker of the risks. This way everyone knows about possible losses.

Be careful how you block. Not all pages need to scale. Product pages on an ecommerce site, for example, are rarely important for ranking as they compete with other products and category or collection pages. If the quality of the collection pages is equal, you have more stability, as products can go out of stock quickly, and if that product does not return, you lose income if you do not focus on the collection instead. Let the team poll the product pages and keep the categories safe if traffic is your goal. Then there are the requirements that must be maintained on product pages, such as internal links and schema.

Tech SEO Guides

The last thing we do is measure conversion pages and build authority pages (SEO) to have simple SEO tech guidelines available when teams make decisions while you’re offline or on vacation. Have a title for each type of page and a list of general guidelines.

A list of standard directives can be a bulleted list with definitions.

• Any pages that are tested separately must have a canonical link back to the main page that is guaranteed to exist.
  • URL: yourdomain.com/product/XYZ is the main URL.
  • yourdomain.com/product/XYZ1 and yourdomain.com/product/XYZ2 are different test URLs.
  • Both split test URLs should have a canonical link back to yourdomain.com/product/XYZ
    • <link rel=“canonical” href=“ />
• H1 tags on category pages should have the main product category specified. Brand statements can go in standard paragraph format and use font size for formatting.
• Temporary and non-SEO landing pages should be placed in the test folder yourdomain.com/test/, blocked by robots.txt, so search engines don’t page.
  • Long-term landing pages are optimized and do not compete with brand-building (SEO) pages to the right site structure. If competing topics are on the main page, put meta robots noindex, follow, or use a canonical link on the main page.
• Any tool that needs to be included in the page header, especially JavaScript, should be checked in the search console to ensure that it does not block the page’s rendering (Google’s ability to detect the page).
  1. Place the text on the page.
  2. Copy the URL and paste it into the Search Console (include a screenshot of the location).
  3. Click View Test and look at the screenshot.
     • If the page is displayed correctly, we are probably safe to use the tool.
     • If the page doesn’t display well, this can affect SEO, and we have to put the text somewhere else or use a different tool.

Branding pages to bring in SEO traffic and improving conversions can both go hand in hand. It’s a matter of working with teams and making sure they have the tools they need to do their jobs without causing damage to your channels. These are the three things we do regularly with our clients, especially business-level or small groups where people are in a hurry and don’t have time to research.

Additional resources:

Featured image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal