Does it work?
Here are the results I get now in the following sets of pages
- Extra2 - 200 pages - Dating for women - not linked in footers - 2000 pages/month -
11000 pages/month best month Oct 2007 - associated with footer links? - This could be... - There was effectively a period in which I started posting footer links fo these pages in a systematic way all across the website - this means that close to 100 pages were promoted repeatedly all over the site - This could be a key
- Extra4 - 50 pages - breakup for men - linked in footers - 1500 pages/month
6000 pages/month best month - Jan 2007
- x5 - 50 pages - breakup for women - not linked - 50 pages/month
2000 pages/month best month - Jan 2007
- x6 - 50 pages - jealousy for men - linked - 600 pages/month
1300 pages/month best month - March 2007
- x7 - 100 pages - break up for men - not linked - 200 pages/month
800 pages/month best month - Dec 2007
- x8 - 100 pages - jealousy for men - not linked - 200 pages/month (lots of variation!)
600 pages/month best month - Jan 2009
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So, it is VERY clear that the pages which are linked via the footer extra4 and x6 score high!
extra2 gets lots of visit but it is 200 pages + High traffic keywords.
The big difference is obvious between:
- Extra4 - 1500 pages/month - linked - breakup for men
- x5 - 50 pages/month - not linked - breakup for women
These pages have the same type of targetd keywords one set for men - one set of women.
Conclusion: pages linked get 5 to 20 times more traffic.
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A few keypoints:
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- The linking must be permanent! - It's not good enough to keep the links there for one month and remove them - It is a long term effort - In the case of the extra4 campaign, it probably took around 6 months for the traffic increase to start kicking in
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- 500+ sales pages to update and maintain! - This is a big challenge because each page functions as a sales page
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- Lower conversion rate - 0.2%-0.5% on SEO pages - 1%-2% on main sales page for the breakup for men pages
This one is a key element the complete main sales page has more feature and is more convincing because it is complete! - The URL is solid
What does it mean?
That optimizing these pages as sales pages is VERY challenging.
You need to take care of:
- Optimization features
- Selling elements
- Easiness to update
- Unique content
These are LOTS of factors to take care off and even with all my focus, I did manage to create a system that was successful.
But... It might be more effctive to use effective traffic building strategies to direct traffic to the main page if possible.
This means that the opitimized pages could be used in another way.
More on next post...