Digital tools are an essential part of the evolving website landscape as competition increases for consumer attention. Creating a custom tool on your website can get you ranked for thousands of new keywords while answering high volume queries that your audience may be asking.
If your tool can solve a problem, you will start building organic traffic.
Our Goal: Increase the overall exposure of the brand through organic SEO. We chose this tool page because it has currently 5th highest sessions on the website as well as ranking for hundreds of keywords that directly relate to the brand.
The article answers many questions that are high volume queries, analyzed through SEMRush.
Analyzing Your Tool Page
Before we start any project regarding a tool page and SEO, we like to take several weeks to analyze the page for the following metrics:
- Traffic
- Heatmaps
- Current organic keyword ranks
Attacking pages with this 3-prong approach will ensure the work you do is deliberate when trying to improve the page.
If you need help with this, we recently wrote an article about how to effectively optimize your landing page for on-page content.
Traffic
When we first started our analysis of the conversion chart, we were seeing an average of 2K clicks to the page every week.
These clicks had an average bounce rate of 70% which put is a difficult position to start working from.
Looking at source traffic, we have about 40% of users coming back as direct traffic. Many people have this page bookmarked or saved in their cache, and return to it daily as they use it.
Heatmaps
Heatmaps are an analytics method that graphically displays the time users have their cursors and viewport on your web page.
After tracking users on this page for a month, we saw that most organic users came from the homepage, scrolled down to the tool section of the website, and spent an average of 3 minutes there.
Depending on the type of tool and if you have software like LuckyOrange installed, you might be able to see exactly how they use this tool and optimize accordingly.
Current Keyword Ranks
If you are paying an SEO company, or if you are doing your optimization in house, you should make sure there is someone always monitoring your organic keywords.
In this case, knowing which organic keywords have the highest volume and chance for conversion for your website, will give you an advantage when it comes to on-page optimizations. Free tools like Google Search Console can help you analyze what keywords your digital tool ranks for organically.
How Did We Improve this Digital Tool?
Many digital tools simply need on-page optimizations to take the page to the next level when it comes to organic traction. Make your page more valuable, more functional, and easier to use.
So how exactly did we do that for this client?
Make it more functional
When we started working on this page, it was just an image. We asked, how can we make this image more functional”?
Avoid using pictures to build your tool. Google understands any text better and how it applies to the page itself.
On this page, we turned the images into an HTML table where the tool became a usable and functional piece of the page.
Earlier we mentioned how session duration was down and it could be due to this. Because the page became more functional, we saw more people using it leaving the page, rather than having users sit on the page for minutes trying to read the table in the image.
Add valuable content
Instinctually, many developers will refrain from adding content to tool pages, and instead, add additional pages that explain how the tool is used.
This is a fine strategy but adding content directly to the tool page will greatly increase the number of keywords your tool page will rank for. You want to increase the number of relevant keywords Google can assign to this page so that they can place it in front of organic users as they search.
Track conversions and user flow
As you optimize your page, create avenues to analyze those optimizations. Whether you are adding more links to the page or simply making the tool more effective, there are methods inside of Google Analytics to set up goal tracking to fully realize and take credit for the work you have done. After our work, we saw 500% increases in user flow to external pages of the one we worked on. That means we were successful!
How did this affect the website?
Here is a snapshot after our first month of work:
As you can see we had about 1800 clicks in the week previous to our work being done. After our work, we noticed some key points stand out:
- Page views up by 150%
- Unique page views up by 60%
- Unique pageviews are a great metric for seeing growth in organic traction. If you have a lot of repeat users visiting your page because it’s a tool, you may see a lot of direct traffic and a low percentage of unique. As your page picks up traction organically, you will see new people entering the site from Google who has never been to the page before.
- Average Time on Page down by 80%
- Off the bat, this would seem like a very bad thing, but our goal in this project was really to increase the exposure of the brand, not just the tool. We see that organically the tool ranks very well, but people come just to the page to use the tool. By adding page content and functionality, we see that people spend generally less time on the page, but an increase in the number of people who come.
- Bounce Rate Down 70%
- This is one of the major indicators that we succeeded in this campaign. A decrease bounce rate means that users who came to the site continued clicking through to more pages instead of pressing the back button. This is a great indicator for us because our increase in traffic means we targeting the perfect audience who want to learn more about our brand.
We saw an increase in traffic for every page that was connected to our conversion calculator page. Here is a screenshot of the traffic the week after the work was done to show the lift in engagement from users on the website.
