Hi there, and welcome to issue #4 of the Outranked SEO newsletter.
I’m hyped to grow this newsletter and have so many ideas for of content I want to share. This will be weekly, on a Friday, but for the first month I’m dropping two newsletters a week; which means this will be landing in your inbox on a Monday, too for now.
In this issue, I’m digging into why your commercial pages; not your blogs, guides, or other top-of-funnel content, but your category, product or service pages, should be your number one SEO priority right now.
You’ll learn:
- Why informational traffic is disappearing (and what that means for your strategy) and why it probably shouldn't ever have been given the focus it was by many brands
- Why rankings for your product, category, and service pages matter more than ever
- How to actually improve those pages; going way beyond just adding more content
Let’s get into it.
Your #1 SEO focus right now should be improving your commercial pages…
There’s a shift happening in search right now, and it’s killing a lot of the traffic that used to make SEO reports look good.
Informational searches are being swallowed by AI Overviews, LLMs, and AI Mode. That “how to” or “what is” blog post you wrote two years ago? Google’s now answering it directly, or in some cases, your audience is asking ChatGPT instead.
But let’s be honest...
A lot of that traffic was never going to convert. At least not anytime soon.
- It made our sites look busier.
- It made charts in reports look better.
- But it rarely drove pipeline, leads, or revenue.
And yes, there's the brand awareness benefit ... but, as marketers, we need to shift our attention to how we get this from other sources. It's not going to be coming back from Google.
Too many SEOs focussed their efforts around the primary goal increasing traffic, without giving much of a thought to how likely it was to convert.
So where should your focus be now?
👉 Your commercial pages.
- Category and product pages for eCommerce retailers.
- Service pages for lead gen.
- Landing pages for SaaS.
These are the pages that drive actions, not just sessions. And right now, the biggest SEO opportunity most brands are sleeping on?
Making these pages better.
Traffic is a vanity metric. Conversions are a sanity metric.
We’ve been conditioned to chase traffic. But that’s becoming less and less meaningful.
Instead, we need to focus on actions:
- Sales
- Leads
- Bookings
- Enquiries
That means your commercial pages, the ones that exist to convert, need to be the best they can possibly be.
Both in order to be as visible on the SERPs but also to convert as many sessions as possible.
But what does it take to improve a commercial page?
Here’s what doesn’t work:
❌ Writing more content for the sake of it
❌ Adding generic FAQs
❌ Blindly copying competitors
Here’s what does work and where to start:
✅ Start with commercial opportunity to prioritise your roadmap
Look at the AOV and conversion rate of your products or services on key commercial pages and pair that with traffic and impression data.
If a page ranks bottom of page one with 5,000 monthly impressions and a 1% CTR, what happens if you move up five spots? What’s the revenue upside? Start there.
Build out a forecast for key commercial pages based on the gap between current performance and their potential (I used this for CTR benchmarking to calculate this).
Prioritise improving pages by their commercial opportunity.
✅ Ask the uncomfortable question
If this page was on a competitor’s site, would it be much different?
If not, you’ve got work to do.
✅ Do real user research
This is where most SEOs skip, and it shows.
- Interview your target customers and clients.
- Ask them to run a search for what you offer. Watch how they behave.
- Ask them what they want to see when they land on a commercial page.
Do they want comparison tables?
Clear USPs?
Social proof?
Answers to specific questions?
Then go make that the centre of the page, not an afterthought.
The more you speak with customers to find out what their wants are, the easier creating 'better' pages becomes.
It's not just customer interviews that work here. Go find relevant discussions on Reddits and see what people are talking about ... what do they care about when buying what you sell? Go watch videos on TikTok.
The more you understand about what your audience wants when shopping for your products or services, the better-placed you are to create pages that they actually engage with.
✅ Communicate your value
If your page doesn’t answer “Why us?” within 5 seconds, it’s not working hard enough.
Make your USPs, trust signals, and benefits front and centre.
✅ Focus on the experience, not just the content
Images. Videos. Interactive elements. Page speed.
You’re not just writing for rankings, you’re designing for decisions.
Experience plays a huge part in this, and whether or not someone sticks on your page or leaves and looks elsewhere.
Page experience matters a lot, and keeping people on your page is a big win. Put in the time, effort and resources to get this right.
The goal isn’t to make pages longer. It’s to make them better.
Better means:
- Higher conversion rates
- Longer dwell times
- Better user signals
- Clearer value
It’s about keeping people on the page once they land, as much as getting them there in the first place.
And you can’t guess what your users want. You have to go ask them.
Yes, it takes work. But nothing worth having comes easy, right?
Use the SERP, but don’t copy it blindly
Look at the pages ranking in the top 3 spots for your most valuable commercial terms.
Then don’t just blindly analyse them, experience them like a searcher would.
Try to consider how someone experiencing these pages for the first time would engage with them. Browsing through the eyes of your target audience can be very revealing; as hard as it can be to do.
What are these pages doing that you’re not?
What are they communicating that you’re not?
Then, armed with both user research and competitor context, go and create something that’s truly better.
Often, it's about more than just slightly reworking these pages. A lot I've worked on recently needed totally transforming.
Your goal should always be to publish the best pages on the web in your sector. 'The best' means different things in different ones, but that's what you gotta go figure out.
The takeaway…
In a world where informational traffic is on a downwards spiral, your commercial pages are your most valuable asset.
They’re where traffic becomes revenue.
So treat them like high-performance sales pages.
And remember:
More content isn’t the goal.
More conversions is.
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If you learned something from this issue or it’s made you think about SEO a little differently, please consider forwarding it to someone else on your team.
I’m on a mission to make sure more SEO investment actually has an impact on real business metrics.
Appreciate you making it to the end; same time next week?
- James Brockbank
P.S. If you ever need expert support with SEO or digital PR and want to drive results that actually matter, I’d love to chat. Let’s talk.
📌 This week’s bookmarks:
If I could only send three links to a fellow marketer this week, it’d be these…
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👋 Hi, I'm James...
Managing Director & Founder at Digitaloft.
I've spent the last 10 years building an agency that's perfectly positioned to help ambitious brands to drive real business growth from SEO and digital PR.
You might have seen me speaking at events like BrightonSEO, SMX and the International Search Summit.
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