With every website, there is always a greater opportunity to optimize than there is time or resources to implement.
Businesses of all sizes must be able to effectively prioritize focus, energy, and expense towards areas that have the most potential impact.
Consistently and quickly identifying and optimizing your most valuable pages (MVPs) is a skill that requires ongoing attention, and is too frequently overlooked.
There is a balance to be achieved between the percentage of time spent on testing, experimentation, and the creation of new potential MVPs versus maintaining your proven winners.
In this article, you’ll learn tips to expedite this process of discovering and optimizing your MVPs in a structured and methodical way.
What are “Most Valuable Pages” (MVPs)?
Put simply, MVPs are the pages or sections of your website that have the greatest business impact.
In some cases, your MVPs may not yet exist; this is something you can discover with content gap analysis and ongoing website expansion driven by key data sets.
For non-ecommerce websites, MVPs would traditionally include pages such as:
- Home page.
- Contact us.
- About us.
- Core service pages.
- Location destination pages.
- Core expertise pages (white papers, guides, informational resources required in the conversation journey).
- Demo or offer pages.
For ecommerce sites, pages such as the home page, contact us, about us, location destinations, etc., are still likely MVPs. However, there would be added emphasis on core commercial intent and revenue-driving areas of the site imperative for income.
Often, these include a mixture of category and product-level pages, plus likely core topical elements of the site where the brand needs to be visible to its audience the most.
This may include problem-solving, audience pain points, and other layers of content – including comparison and evaluation – that help move people through the information-seeking and buying funnel.
How to Decide Which MVPs to Focus On
MVPs must be closely aligned to your business objectives and how that translates online – your most popular pages aren’t necessarily MVPs if they don’t drive traffic where it needs to go or help your company achieve a measurable business outcome.
If you are looking for brand exposure, your most valuable pages would be very different than a revenue-driven set of objectives.
It’s important to have a broad enough approach to the metrics that matter in order to then apply them into the decision-making process.
If choosing MVPs is a new topic to you and your business, I’d suggest looking at the reporting you currently focus on (online and offline), and what measurements are consistently emphasized to review progress in your organization.
How to Find MVPs
Once you have clarity on the metrics or key success measurements, it will be much easier to decide on the pages that become MVPs and assess new priority pages or changes to MVPs over time.
For visibility metrics such as online impressions, click-through rates, search volume, clicks, and other areas like an average page or term rank, Google Search Console is a useful tool to use.
For post-click data such as traffic, website events, goal completions, purchases, bounce rates, and more, then Google Analytics is often the main go-to.
There are plenty of other tools for more specific tasks tied to MVP selection, such as competitor comparison, backlink growth, and other areas like user experience.
Ahrefs and Semrush are good starting points if you need to expand your data collection.
Here are some useful posts to help select the metrics that matter:
- Top 13 SEO Metrics to Track Content Performance & Engagement
- SEO Reports: Which Metrics Matter & How to Use Them Well
Optimizing Your Most Valuable Pages
Optimization comes in many forms and with myriad objective-led outcomes.
As you would expect, the type of optimization activity you pursue is closely matched to the intended gains you set out to achieve, the overriding purpose of the page or content in question, plus other factors like the marketing channel being deployed.
It is important to have a varied and consistent way of looking at performance spanning the main marketing channels and reviewing these in tandem with clear and SMART objectives.
With each channel, there are associated traditional and fundamental optimization tactics required. I always suggest beginning with the basics/fundamentals or seeking expertise from a professional agency.
Example MVP Optimization – Home Page
Let’s dig in with some practical advice for optimization on one of the most common MVPs – the home page.
As the frequently catch-all entry destination into the website and one of the highest traffic and visibility pages, the home page can fulfill many functions.
Initially (pre-optimization), you will need to decide on the role and function that you need to maximize for the page to be benchmarked and progressed against.
Common home page functions, for example:
- Grow and establish awareness of the site for brand and catch-all (and often newer/smaller) topics. Metrics include: impressions, average page and key terms rank, CTR, visits.
- Drive users to commercial impact pages. Metrics include bounce rate, pages per visit, time on page, events (such as click events from calls to action).
- User experience/usability. Metrics include Core Web Vitals, exit rate, and related items mentioned above.
- Establish trust, expertise, and authority. Metrics include time on page, pages viewed, event clicks, key page interaction.
- Sell/promote high ROI products and services. Metrics include traffic, revenue, transactions, clicks to converting pages, and ideal user journey entry/progression.
Typically, the home page has a number of key elements that require iterative testing, refinement, and improvement.
As always, before making any changes you need to ensure you have the necessary data in place to support any hypothesis testing or experience-led updates.
Elements you will want to dedicate time and resource on for the home page could include:
- Organic and paid adverts.
- On page headings.
- Pre-scroll content.
- CTAs.
- Content hierarchy.
- Content freshness and depth.
- Trust signals, reviews, testimonials, case studies, social proof, and validation.
- Page interaction.
- Navigation (main/sub).
- Visual content (placement, use, variation, content types).
MVPs as an Ongoing and Iterative Approach
Like most (if not all) website and marketing optimization, MVPs should form an always-on part of your digital marketing strategy.
The percentage of focus will differ between active priorities, seasonality, and broader company and industry triggers, but the main takeaway should be having a conscious decision to reduce or change attention as part of the approach.
If it’s not possible to have some degree of monthly MVP inclusion in the marketing plan, you will want to ensure basic (quick/simple) checks are made on the performance against expectations so that data changes are not overlooked regardless of active focus on these pages.
In Summary
It’s most effective to have an always-on approach to optimizing your most valuable pages (MVPs).
These valuable pages have a substantial business and commercial impact and require consistent and reliable ways to assess, refine and improve performance through optimization.
Your MVPs will differ, but there are commonalities spanning most websites in what makes an MVP.
Identifying and optimizing these pages will differ in some ways, but there are consistent factors to consider. Always look at the alignment of MVPs to company objectives and the purpose of the page when it comes to metrics and measurement of MVP performance.
If in doubt, seek independent expertise from well-established and trusted agencies who can help put in place strategies and sanity check approaches that may be in place already.
More Resources:
- 25 of the Best Examples of Home Pages
- 9 Essential Types of Webpages Every SEO Pro Needs to Know
- Complete Guide to On-Page SEO
Featured Image: ABCDesign/Shutterstock
