Action items

Action Items

How to take action on page recommendations in the ércule app.

Rewrite Content

Pages with this flag look like they are beginning to see an organic traffic dip. They have gotten good traffic for you in the past and now is the time to make updates to try to keep traffic strong.

  1. Analyze Search Console data – which keywords have changed the most in the last 3 months?
  2. Identify which keywords you want to continue aligning with the page. Usually 1 or 2 keywords is plenty to focus on for an individual page.
  3. Update content to improve SERP performance for those keywords:
    1. Make sure the page is not light on content and that users are finding all the info they need for a given keyword.
    2. Make sure the page has a clear, strong title and headers throughout that reinforce your focus keyword.
    3. Make sure the page is easy to navigate and is broken up with headers, images, pullquotes etc. to improve readability.
    4. Make sure the page includes good links to next steps, encouraging users to stay on your site.

Improve Engagement

Pages with this recommendation are getting a good amount of traffic and seem to be important to your site, but have low engagement rates overall.

  1. Assess the page experience:
    1. Does the site load quickly? (Check with Google’s page speed insights tool.)
    2. Are pop-ups and visual design making it hard to actually read?
    3. How is the quality of writing and H-tag organization?
  2. If the UX fundamentals seem to be strong, take a look at the call-to-action and internal links. Each should provide a clear next step for the visitor.
    1. Are there internal links to other relevant posts on your site? (If not, add some. If you can’t find any, then this might be a sign that the post isn’t a great match for your audience.)
    2. Is there a CTA that can match the visitor’s intent? (Top-funnel leads don’t want to schedule a demo of your pizza robot, but they might sign up for your brand newsletter.)

Consolidate

Pages with this recommendation probably need a lot of work to see meaningful improvement – they’ve had a trickle of traffic but it’s been a while and they aren’t making much of a splash.

  1. Do a quick content assessment – is any of this material useful or insightful enough to salvage?
  2. If your content still looks valuable, you can:
    1. Repurpose the content to improve other pages that are already performing.
    2. Combine a few similar pages into one new and improved page.
    3. Rework the content on the current page to try and improve organic rankings. This option is usually the most work.
  3. If the content isn’t valuable, you can likely prune this page from your site entirely without causing much harm.

Fixing Titles

There are a few recommendations that ércule gives for page titles:

  • Fix Missing Title – we can’t find a title for these pages. If the page looks important, it’s worth taking the time to give it a title.
  • Fix Duplicate Title – the title of this page seems to be reused across multiple pages. This is confusing in search and likely means your title is being overwritten by search engines. If the page is important, consider retitling it.
  • Shorten Title – the page title looks too long to fully display in all search engines. If your looking to increase search ranking, it may be worth writing a shorter title (under 65 chars).