Best practice for page rankings
Page rankings allow manual pinning of the most important results for specified search terms. Before configuring page rankings, there are certain things to consider. Since the page rankings are manually maintained, they will not change until a MyCludo user manually changes the configuration. If the need for the page ranking is expected to change over time, it is recommended to plan when the reconfiguration should happen. If this is not done, there is a risk of the page ranking being forgotten and continuing to show outdated results to the visitors.
Example
On a telecom site, a page ranking is set up to manually place the newest model of a phone as the top result when users search for a certain brand or phone name. Once a newer model of the phone is launched, it is important to reconfigure the ranking to reflect this. Otherwise, it will continue to show the now outdated phone as the top result.
Alternatively, another feature like Boostings can be used to dynamically promote new phones over older phones.
No matter what changes may happen to the pages and their content over time, a page ranking will continue to show the defined pages, until a the configuration is updated.
Keep in mind that any results that are otherwise triggered by the search term(s) added to a page ranking will naturally display below the ranked pages.
When to set up a page ranking
The rule of thumb is to always keep your visitors in mind when working with tools that impact the ranking of your results. That especially goes for page rankings, since page rankings are on the top of the hierarchy when the engine determines the order of results. So, when should you set up a page ranking?
When you have a strong anticipation of what results are most important for your visitors for certain search terms
Example
During covid, a municipality would have a large number of pages on this matter, ranging from news articles to informative content. A page ranking could be set up to ensure that the page about test center locations would always be on top.
When you notice search terms with poor interaction in your analytics, especially ineffective searches
Example
Ineffective searches are evident of search terms producing irrelevant result. By adding a page ranking for an ineffective search term, you ensure the most important result(s) appear first, thereby increasing the CTR (click-through-rate) for the search term in question.
We always recommend keeping an eye on analytics when interacting with a tool like page rankings to make sure you’re meeting your users’ expectations.
Using special syntax to cover abbreviations or patterns
Instead of spending time entering – and possibly forgetting about – all the variations of a word (abbreviations), make things easier for yourself by relying on special syntax to do the job. Special syntax can also be used to cover certain patterns, like a product ID.
Special syntax and usage
| Asterisk (*) | Also known as a wildcard. Will match any alphanumeric string of any length. Examples: ‘*bike*‘ would match any search term including “bike”, thereby covering everything from “mountain bike” to “bike path” or simply “bikes”. ‘health*‘ would match search terms like “healthcare” or “healthy eating” but not “everyday health”, because the asterisk is only placed at the end of the term “health”. |
| Pound (#) | Will match numbers. Each ‘#’ symbol is equivalent of one number. Example: Products have a product ID, always consisting of 10 numbers in a row. A page ranking activated by ‘##########‘ would trigger every time a product ID is entered, for example, if you would always like the product overview page to appear first when a product ID is entered. |
| Question mark (?) | Will match alphanumeric characters, meaning both numbers and letters. Each ‘?’ symbol represents a number or letter. Example: Continuing from the example above, let’s pretend product IDs consist of two letters and 6 numbers. Then, you could set up the page ranking to be triggered by ‘??######‘. It is never recommended to only use the ‘?’ symbol for a page ranking. If you had a page ranking for 8 question marks, ‘????????‘, this would trigger all search results that contain an 8-letter word. |