How to Find & Optimize Your MVPs (Most Valuable Pages)

With every website, there is always more opportunity for improvement than the time or resources available for implementation.

Businesses of all sizes must be able to effectively prioritize focus, energy, and expenditures toward the areas of greatest potential impact.

Consistently and quickly identifying and optimizing your Most Valuable Pages (MVPs) is a skill that requires constant attention, and is often overlooked.

There is a balance to be struck between the percentage of time you spend testing, experimenting and creating new best leads versus maintaining proven winners.

In this article, you will learn tips to speed up the process of spotting and improving the best professional players in an organized and systematic way.

What are the Most Valuable Pages (MVPs)?

Simply put, MVPs are the pages or sections of your website that have the most business impact.

In some cases, the best player in the game may not be there yet; This is something you can discover through content gap analysis and continuous website expansion driven by major datasets.

For non-ecommerce websites, MVPs usually include pages like:

• Homepage.
• call us.
• about us.
• Main service pages.
• Website destination pages.
• Essential Experience Pages (white papers, guides, informational resources needed on the Conversational Journey).
• Presentation or presentation pages.

For ecommerce websites, pages like Home, Contact Us, About Us, Site Destinations, etc. are still probably the best value. However, there will be an additional focus on core commercial intent and revenue generating areas of the site that are critical to monetization.

They often include a mix of category and product level pages, as well as potential core thematic elements of the site where the brand needs to be visible to its audience the most.

This may include problem solving, audience weaknesses, and other layers of content — including comparison and evaluation — that help move people through the information search and purchase path.

How to determine the best player in the game should focus on

MVPs need to be closely aligned with your business goals and how that translates online — your most popular pages aren’t necessarily the best pages if they’re not driving traffic to where you need it to go or helping your company achieve a measurable business result.

If you’re looking for exposure for your brand, your most valuable pages will be very different from a set of revenue-driven goals.

It is important to have a broad enough approach to the important metrics in order to then apply them in your decision-making process.

If selecting MVPs is a new topic for you and your business, I suggest looking at what reports you’re currently focusing on (online and offline), and what metrics are continually emphasized to review progress in your organization.

How to find the best player in the game

Once you have clarity on the key success metrics or metrics, it will be much easier to identify which pages become MVPs and evaluate which pages have new priority or MVP changes over time.

For visibility metrics like online impressions, click-through rates, search volume, clicks, and other areas like page average or term ranking, Google Search Console is a useful tool to use.

For post-click data like traffic, website events, goal completions, purchases, bounce rates, and more, Google Analytics is often the main target.

There are plenty of other tools for more specific tasks associated with MVP selection, such as competitor comparison, backlink growth, and other areas such as user experience.

Ahrefs and Semrush are good starting points if you need to expand your data collection.

Here are some helpful posts to help identify important metrics:

• Top 13 SEO metrics for tracking content performance and engagement
• SEO Reports: Which Metrics Are Important and How to Use Them Well

Optimize your most valuable pages

Improvement comes in many forms and with a myriad of goal-driven outcomes.

As you would expect, the type of optimization activity you pursue is closely aligned with the intended gains you set out to achieve, the primary purpose of the page or content in question, as well as other factors such as the marketing channel being deployed.

It is important to have a diverse and consistent way of looking at and reviewing performance that includes key marketing channels along with clear and credible goals.

With each channel, there are traditional and basic optimization tactics associated with it. I always suggest starting with the basics/fundamentals or seeking expertise from a professional agency.

MVP optimization example – homepage

Let’s dive into some practical tips for optimizing on one of the most popular MVPs – the home page.

As the overall destination for frequently entering a website and one of the highest traffic and visibility pages, the homepage can fulfill many functions.

At the outset (pre-optimization) you will need to define the role and function you need to scale the page in order for performance and progression to be measured against.

Common home page functions, for example:

• Develop and demonstrate site awareness For branding themes and grouping everything (and often newer/younger). Metrics include: impressions, average page, rank for keywords, click-through rate, and visits.
• Drive users to commercial impact pages. Metrics include bounce rate, pages per visit, time on page, and events (such as click events from calls to action).
• User Experience/Ease of Use. Metrics include basic web vitality, exit rate, and related items mentioned above.
• Build confidence, experience and authority. Metrics include time spent on page, pages viewed, event clicks, and homepage engagement.
• Selling/promoting products and services with a high return on investment. Metrics include traffic, revenue, transactions, clicks to convert pages, and ideal user journey entry/progress.

A homepage usually contains a number of core elements that require iterative testing, refinement, and improvement.

As always, before making any changes, you need to make sure you have the data necessary to support any hypothesis testing or experiment-led updates.

Items that you want to dedicate time and resources to for the home page can include:

• Organic and paid ads.
• in page titles.
• Pre-scroll content.
• Call-to-action statements.
• Content hierarchy.
• Content freshness and depth.
• Trust references, reviews, testimonials, case studies, social proof, and validation.
• Page interaction.
• Navigation (main / sub).
• Visual content (placement, usage, variation, content types).

MVPs as an ongoing, iterative approach

Like most (if not all) website and marketing optimization, MVPs should form a permanent part of your digital marketing strategy.

The percentage of focus will vary between active priorities, seasonality, and broader company and industry triggers, but the main goal should be making a conscious decision to reduce or change attention as part of the approach.

If it is not possible to get some degree of MVP per month included in the marketing plan, you will want to ensure that basic (quick/simple) checks are carried out on performance against expectations so that data changes are not overlooked regardless of the active focus on these pages.

Briefly

It is most effective to have a continuous approach to improving your Most Valuable Pages (MVPs).

These valuable pages have significant business and business impact and require consistent and reliable ways to evaluate and improve performance through optimization.

Your MVP will vary, but there is a commonality that encompasses most websites which makes an MVP.

Selecting and optimizing these pages will differ in some ways, but there are consistent factors to keep in mind. Always look at the alignment of MVPs with the company’s goals and purpose page when it comes to metrics and measurement of MVP performance.

If in doubt, seek independent expertise from established and trusted agencies who can help develop strategies and validation methods that may already be in place.

More resources:

• 25 of the best homepage examples
• 9 Basic Types of Web Pages Every SEO Professional Needs to Know
• The complete guide to on-page SEO

Featured image: ABCDesign/Shutterstock