Sometimes the information I glean from my deep data analysis reveals something unexpected. Today I'm presenting you with some solid ideas of why it's better to use some words over others for naming pages on your site. For each page type I've showing you the different variations of the name and why one is the best to use.I found that "sell-your-gold" as a page name works better than a page called "we-buy-gold."
Once a person is on your site they have about an equal chance of reading the page but what's really a benefit is that the "sell" variation is 45.3% more likely to attract people to your site.
Although people want to write reviews about you on websites like Yelp and Google+, when it comes to your website, the term "testimonials" is more important than the word "reviews." I've found that pages called "testimonials" were 15% more likely to attract visitors to your website than a page called "customer-reviews." Even more important is that the testimonials variant was 44% more likely to attract readers once they were on your site. This is one of those pages that keeps people on your site a little longer.
All the jewelers that I work with have some type of repair service. I found that there were 5 different variations on what they called their repair service page. Some simply call it "jewelry-repair" or "watch-repair;" while others combine those into "jewelry-repair-watch-repair." Then there are a few who included the word 'laser' in their page name and called it something like "jewelry-laser-repair." Finally I found some jewelers combined their repairs and engraving services into a single "repairs-engraving" page name.
In this situation I found that there were three good performing pages name, but you have to keep them simple, they are: "jewelry-repair," "watch-repair," and "engraving." When you keep the page names simple you have the best chance of attracting visitors to your website or getting them to click on those pages once they are there.
Now let me move on to your online catalog. It seems that every online product management software system has their own naming convention for how to display products. Many will use "index.php" with long strings of variables and many will use simplified page names. According to my measurement, if you use the word "catalog" in your page name, as in "jewelry-catalog" or "online-catalog," you are 24% more likely to attract visitors than if you didn't use it.
Education pages are still an important part of your website. Any information about the 4C's of Diamonds, gemstones, or birthstones will always attract attention from search results. Any page about the 4C's should have a page name listed as "4cs-of-diamonds" and any birthstone page should actually have the word "birthstone" in the name. Don't be tempted to use the plural "birthstones" because people who search are usually searching for the word birthstone along with the month, e.g. "September birthstone."
So there you have it; just a few examples of how to improve the structure of the page names on your website. One point of note though, these measured results come from my own data across many jewelers stores. While analyzing this I was only looking at the actual URL page names and not at the content on the page. There are a lot of factors that go into search engine optimization and these measurements were from websites with good SEO and horrible SEO.
All things being equal, the ideas suggested here provide better performance for the sites I'm measuring, but it might not work for you.
