Detecting search terms and redirecting to landing page

[benners]

I'm trying to improve my bounce rate by re-directing organic traffic to a more targetted landing page by detecting certain search terms in the referring URL. I'm aware of the issues of permanent and temporary redirects and how search engines interpret these, but are there any issues I should consider if I set up a temporary redirect if certain search terms are detected in the referer? As far as I can see this wouldn't have any impact for search engines, but I need to certain. Thanks for reading.

[cryptblade]

Let's think about this for a minute here. You're talking about "serving up" a custom landing page in real time for organic traffic? Yes?

How would you do that?

Assuming that you rank, you rank organically for permanent content. How are you going to target a keyword for organic rankings and then real time change it up?

If you get traffic from one keyword, the visitor comes, and decides that he's not interested, he's going to leave, plain and simple.

Maybe you don't understand the keyword. Maybe you don't understand the user's intentions. Maybe your site is not intuitive or is just looks plain ugly.

I can think of one solution that may, perhaps, come close what you are talking about, but it's not doing any redirecting.

[benners]

Thanks for your comments. Perhaps if I give more specifics it would be easier to understand what I'm thinking. If you search Google.co.uk for "speed dating" I'm #1. My bounce rate has increased since a recent site re-design. My site doesn't just offer speed dating so visitors arriving at the home page from a search for "speed dating" would be better served with a different page or altogether or perhaps a home page with more optimised content.

[cryptblade]

Well there's your answer. Your site redesign makes it "irrelevant" to the searcher's mindset.

If I'm seeing this right, then your title tag says "speed dating" and you yourself wrote that you don't just do speed dating (with the implication that you do more than just that).

So this is good news for you. Now you just adjust the content and say what you told me. You offer this and this - as well as speed dating.

Have links to your more appropriate speed dating pages. Get fancy with some graphics.

This is a "conversion" issue, not an optimization issue. You should never ever rely 100% on keywords as a "lead qualifier".

Keyword searches vary and no keyword research tool is 100% accurate. SEO's goal is to drive traffic to the site. Conversion is dependent on the user experience. Conversion covers your bounce rate. But rely on your site design and messaging for conversion, not keywords. Keywords will bring a greater number of qualified traffic - but not qualify traffic for you.

[benners]

What you're saying all makes good sense, however the issues I have is that I offer a wide range of products and people aren't really searching in great numbers for "compare dating sites" which is how you'd summarise my site.

There maybe more I could do graphically so the home page caters for "speed dating" and everything else, but I'd appreciate your thoughts as to whether there was any SEO reason why I shouldn't detect this search term and display a more more optimised graphic?

[AussieWebmaster]

you have to be careful - Google could see that as a form of cloaking

[jag]

As cryptblade said, this is not an optimization issue this is a conversion issue.

If people searches for "speed dating" and if you list first you have success with SEO and people don’t just open your site window they may be opening other listings say 2 to 5 sites sometimes even 10 and even more. They go for the site which attracts and which serves them better right! So checkout those sites and get to know how to improve your site and get to a framework how to present your service "speed dating" better than them may be through graphics or/ and highlighting content.

So hope now you understand the problem is with conversion. Also show content, which is seen, identical for both users and search engines and redirection is not a solution. Think long term :)

[ChiefLee]

What you've described is also a great reason why you should consider some A/B testing of your site. Through google you can serve up multiple versions of your site, and track behaviors. Though this is best for testing minor changes, and not sweeping changes. Sounds like you already know that the new site has caused you some problems.

And yes, I'd also be concerned with google thinking that you're developing doorway pages with the redirecting.

[seodotnet]

Dynamic redirection depending on keywords to different websites will give you more problems then you probably think. SE can get confused if you mess up anything. Then SE are constantly developing and it will be difficult for you to control the whole process.
I think not good for your SEO

[maneetpuri]

Hi Guys

I did redesign my website few days back and used a unique style of navigation but was worried about whether the potential visitors will like it or not so, I request on some forums to review my new design and I got some valuable comments from there and according I made few little changes on my site design and after that I got my website bounce rate down.

so if you are not sure that your visitors are happy with your new design or not you can request on some good forums like searchenginewatch for comments on your new design.

Hope this helps!

[briangillet]

There are many ways to orient your visitors and the most important principle is to make the links highly visible and relevant to the current page.

[bhartzer]

re-directing organic traffic to a more targetted landing page
I totally agree, if it's organic traffic and you're redirecting then you're cloaking. Totally against the search engines' TOS.

Better thing to do would actually be to put up a special message at the top of the page welcoming those visitors from certain keyword phrases.

[AussieWebmaster]

but a 301 is not seen as cloaking

[BrianCosgrove]

I can't think of a reason that a page would have such a broad set of terms that it ranks for, while other pages on the same site are more relevant and don't rank for that term.

Cleverness here is awkward at best and a full on bait-and-switch at worst. Why not do what everyone else does and optimize the page that they're landing on to be a bit more efficient?

[AussieWebmaster]

there is a php program that uses the http referring url info of the search query to insert the term in to title description and on page copy