The project bubbled over into an Entry Page Deep-Dive where I discovered that 68% of the traffic entered on 20 pages. For these pages I then pulled in their total visits, exits, and single page visits. Based on these 4 data points, and using some simple standard deviation, and median averages, I was able to pinpoint what pages out of these 20 were the best candidates for improvement. I ended up calling these 'Leaky Pages' because they were the ones getting the most eyeballs first (thus giving the highest amount of 'first impressions') but at the same time, also losing a lot of the traffic via exits, or bounces. A lot of these pages were downloads that people are searching on, and of course the goal of SEO is to get people exactly what they are looking for so there is a win there. At the same time however, these pages werent a big enough draw to keep the visitors, basically a good chunk of traffic was coming to the site for a specific download, getting it, then leaving.
By paring the 20 pages down to just the critical few, it gave the client something to work on immediately, rather than making sweeping changes to the entire site. If they make a few optimizations on these pages, they can surely drive people into the site more often, and keep them on the site longer. It also took the attention away from making immediate optimization changes to the Homepage because, if I've done my job correctly, they will see there is less value in optimizing for an increase of 1,000 clicks, vs losing 100k visits in a month due to a Thank You page that isnt engaging.
Check these two charts out, the first identifies the top 20 entry pages, and the second identifies which pages have a bouunce rate 1 standard deviation above the median average page-bounce rate, and which have a lower click-through rate than 1 standard deviation below the median click-through rate. Its a pretty simple way to see exactly where to focus your efforts.
