This is a topic that’s not often discussed openly in the SEO community or the online marketing world.

Most people who have an SEO strategy in place to drive links to a certain category page, will no doubt understand that the main aim is to improve the position of this keyword. The immediate benefit is obvious, in that as positions improve, so does traffic from this keyword.

This post looks beyond this and explores other side benefits, which often get overlooked.

Fig 1: Website architecture

I’ll be using real data to demonstrate this, but have masked the client!

Below is a diagram showing how most websites are normally structured, with the homepage, followed by a category page, in this instance a country. Under the country page are regional country pages followed by properties.

We have been driving links using various link development tactics to the country page (as indicated by the green circles).

Initially when we started working on this campaign back in November 09, the website was ranking outside the top 100 for this keyword.

Fig 2: Positions report

Over the past 9 months, the position of this keyword has risen to position 6 in Google. Now if we look at the direct traffic from this keyword over the same time period, the traffic graph looks like this.

Fig 3: Exact visits

As positions increase, we’d expect to see more traffic from exact match searches from this keyword. This is a fantastic result for the client, but are we really showing value from this campaign?

As SEO professionals, we all know that if we drive links to the country level page, this will have a knock on effect on the other pages underneath this hierarchy.

Exploring analytics further into non-brand visits containing this keyword i.e.  Country1 plus {variations}, the table looks like this:

Fig 4: Visits from associated keywords

As we can see, driving links to the main country page increases visits from keywords associated with Country1.

Another metric we can look into is the number of natural visits to the regional pages and hotel pages, underneath the main category page.

Fig 5: Visits to pages under Country1

The graph above shows that as positions increase, traffic to all the pages underneath the main country increases and though it’s not shown in this data, another side benefit includes an increase in revenue which results in a happy client!

Summary:

When driving links to the main category page:
1.    The positions of this keyword will improve
2.    Better visibility in Google will be achieved, meaning more traffic from this keyword
3.    There will be an increase in search referrals from variations of the target keyword
4.    Visits to pages underneath the category page will also increase
5.    Revenue will also increases (hopefully!)