Page Yield is an unusual SEO metric, and one we don’t often see discussed. Simply, the yield is the % of pages receiving traffic compared to the number of pages your site has.

SEO Scotland site Page Yield as one of their top 3 basic KPIs and Practical Ecommerce also cite it as one of their “metrics that matter”.

So why is Page Yield useful? Well it gives a percentage answer that is easily worked out, can be compared site to site or against a benchmark figure, and is a good indication of how many “valuable” pages your site has compared to “deadwood” pages.

There are always a certain amount of pages on a site that you would expect not to attract search engine traffic – your privacy policy for instance is not a very likely landing page! But overall, it is still surprising that for an average Vertical Leap client site that under half of the pages account for all the SEO traffic (46% on the sample I used). However, this compares very favourably to the figures in the White Paper from Netconcepts where the average is 14% and SEO Scotland’s quoted figure of a 20% average.

So page yield is a useful metric for comparison with other sites, and also for checking on a single site’s improvement over time. By highlighting the pages that don’t bring in search engine traffic, it can give you pointers to what areas of your site need extra work, whether with keyword relevance, internal linking, raising authority or adding content.

This is part 7 in this series – here are the links to the other 6 posts:

• Part 1 The long tail
• Part 2 Website traffic
• Part 3 Conversions
• Part 4 Rankings
• Part 5 Bounce Rate
• Part 6 Online Mentions