What to do with high-traffic pages that are not related to e-commerce?

[jyskvin]

Hello folks!

We run a webshop selling wine and spirits, which obviously serves the purpose to generate revenue. To add further value to our customers, we have a section on the site, suggesting food recipes. The main purpose of that section is to inspire and educate about how wine and foods can be combined.

Rankings are getting higher on "important" keywords for our business, in terms of products and product categories. However, the recipe pages, which are less important, are getting much more organic traffic.

So here comes my question: Having "less important" pages that do not convert in terms of purchases, but however do get loads of organic traffic, what could I do with these pages, in terms of SEO? Could they be used to pass link juice to other, more "important" pages, that we actually want to rank on?

Thanks!

[Silkstream]

Hey, yeah I'd link them up for SEO, though the benefits will be far less that if you concentrate on funnelling your visitors to these recipe pages through to the target pages. It's really hard to convert a sale when someone is looking for information, but all of the traffic that lands on your recipe pages are now aware of who you are so make sure the site is well branded too!

[jyskvin]

Hi, thank you for quick reply.

Exactly my thought - if you're looking for how to cook a chicken, you're most certainly not going to buy a wine in the process. So converting home-chefs to wine customers, will without doubt be an uphill battle. However, we do try to inspire visitors and linking recipes to products, by suggesting wines to each recipe.

That being said - the "best" SEO practice, would then be to just pass link juice from recipe pages to product/category pages?

[TomRayner]

Hi there

Great to see a content marketing strategy generating "extra" traffic.  In order to pass on an SEO benefit, you may want internally link from within the body of the article to your core landing pages.  That may pass on "the strength" of that page, as it were.  With internal links, you can link to your landing pages with your target keywords a bit more often that you normally would when link building from external sites, but don't overdo it. (I'd say 20-25% of links with your keyword in the anchor text would be OK for internal links - please don't do that for external links!).

Of course, the main objective I see would be to capture that traffic that comes in on those blog/resource pages and get it to convert.  Have you looked at running an email widget next to the blog?  Perhaps you can use an exit popup, popup, popunder or interstitial ad as well.  These methods are more aggressive and "in your face", but contrary to what you may think they really do convert.

Hope this helps.