Your most important pages might have the biggest impact on your business. Learn about MVPs and how to make the most of them.
There is always more possibility to optimize a website than there is time or resources to accomplish it.
Businesses of all sizes must be able to focus their attention, energy, and resources on the areas with the greatest potential impact.
Identifying and optimizing your most valuable pages (MVPs) consistently and fast is a skill that demands continual attention and is all too often disregarded.
There must be a balance between the time spent testing, experimenting, and creating new potential MVPs and the time spent maintaining your proven successes.
In this post, you’ll learn how to speed up the process of identifying and optimizing your MVPs in a scientific and organized manner.
What are “Most Valuable Pages” (MVPs)?
Simply put, MVPs are the pages or areas of your website that have the most influence on your business.
Your MVPs may not yet exist in some circumstances; you may find out whether this is the case by doing a content gap analysis and continuing to expand your website based on crucial data sets.
Traditionally, MVPs for non-ecommerce websites might include pages like:
- Home Page
- 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.
Pages devoted to core competencies (white papers, guides, informational resources required in the conversation journey). Pages that serve as a demonstration or an offer.
Pages like the home page, contact us, about us, location destinations, and so on are still likely MVPs for ecommerce sites. However, there would be a greater focus on the site’s fundamental commercial goal and revenue-generating parts, which are critical for revenue.
Typically, these feature a combination of category and product-level pages, as well as the site’s main topical aspects where the brand needs to be seen the most.
Problem-solving, audience pain points, and other layers of content – such as comparison and evaluation – that assist users move through the information-seeking and buying funnel are examples of this.
How to Decide Which MVPs to Focus On
Your most popular pages aren’t necessarily MVPs if they don’t drive traffic where it needs to go or assist your firm achieve a measurable business goal.
Your most valuable pages will be significantly different from a revenue-driven set of objectives if you’re striving for brand promotion.
It’s critical to take a comprehensive view of the metrics that matter before incorporating them into the decision-making process.
If choosing MVPs is a new issue for you and your company, I’d recommend taking a look at the reporting you’re already doing (both online and offline) and what metrics are consistently used to track progress.
How to Find MVPs
It will be much easier to decide which pages will become MVPs and to analyze new priority pages or modifications to MVPs over time once you have clarity on the metrics or important success measurements.
Google Search Console is a valuable tool to utilize for visibility data such as online impressions, click-through rates, search volume, clicks, and other areas such as an average page or term rank.
Google Analytics is frequently used to track post-click data such as traffic, website events, goal completions, purchases, bounce rates, and more.
Other tools for more particular tasks related to MVP selection, such as competition comparison, backlink growth, and other areas such as user experience, are available.
If you need to expand your data gathering, Ahrefs and Semrush are terrific places to start.
Optimizing Your Most Valuable Pages
Optimization takes numerous shapes and has a wide range of objective-driven outcomes.
As you might guess, the type of optimization activity you undertake is closely aligned to the goals you set for yourself, the overarching aim of the page or content in question, as well as other aspects like the marketing channel you’re using.
It’s critical to have a consistent and varied approach to analysing performance across the major marketing channels, and to do it in tandem with clear and SMART targets.
Optimization takes numerous shapes and has a wide range of objective-driven outcomes. Each channel necessitates the use of traditional and fundamental optimization techniques. I usually recommend starting with the basics/fundamentals or obtaining professional assistance.
Example MVP Optimization – Home Page
Let’s get started with some tips for optimising one of the most prevalent MVPs: the home page.
The home page, as the primary entry point into the website and one of the most visited and visible pages, can serve a variety of purposes.
You must first decide on the role and function that you want to maximise for the page that will be benchmarked and progressed against (pre-optimization).
For instance, these are some common home page functions:
- Grow and establish brand and catch-all (and frequently newer/smaller) topic awareness for the site. Impressions, average page and key phrase rank, CTR, and visits are some of the metrics used.
- Users will be directed to pages that have a commercial impact. Bounce rate, pages per visit, duration on page, and events are examples of metrics (such as click events from calls to action).
- Usability and user experience are two terms that are often used interchangeably. Core Web Vitals, exit rate, and related elements are examples of metrics.
- Establish a sense of authority, competence, and trustworthiness. Time on page, pages viewed, event clicks, and key page engagement are some of the metrics.
- Sell/promote high-return-on-investment (ROI) products and services. Traffic, revenue, transactions, clicks to converting pages, and ideal user journey entry/progression are all metrics to consider.
The home page usually has a number of critical parts that need to be tested, refined, and improved iteratively.
As usual, make sure you have the data you need to support any hypothesis testing or experience-driven improvements before making any changes.
For the home page, you may wish to devote time and resources to the following elements:
- 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
MVPs, like most (if not all) website and marketing optimization, should be part of your digital marketing plan at all times.
The amount of focus will vary depending on active priorities, seasonality, and larger corporate and industry triggers, but the primary takeaway should be to make a conscious decision to reduce or change attention as part of the overall strategy.
If some level of monthly MVP inclusion in the marketing plan isn’t achievable, you’ll want to make sure that basic (quick/simple) checks on performance against expectations are conducted so that data changes aren’t neglected despite active concentration on these sites.
Conclusion
When it comes to optimizing your most valuable pages, having an always-on approach is the most beneficial (MVPs).
These vital pages have a significant corporate and commercial influence, necessitating consistent and accurate methods for assessing, refining, and optimizing performance.
Your MVPs will be unique, however there are certain parallels in what defines an MVP across most websites.
In some ways, identifying and optimizing these sites will be different, but there are certain common elements to keep in mind. When it comes to analytics and measuring MVP success, make sure MVPs are aligned with company goals and the page’s purpose.
If in doubt, seek independent advice from well-known and trustworthy organizations that can help you implement strategies and sanity-check ways that may already be in place.