The concept of PLP Monitoring or Preferred Landing Monitoring is the action of ensuring that the page that was created and optimized to convert the best for a specific query, audience, market, or campaign is the actual page ranking the highest. I developed this concept and applied it to the rank reporting scorecards for HP to overcome the problem of the many duplicate pages created by business units. The goal was to not only “rank” for a phrase but to ensure that the correct page was ranking. As you can imagine the business unit SEO’s did not like this since they wanted to take credit for “any page” ranking in spite of the user experience.
We have found that replacing “any ranking page” with a specific PLP can lead to as much as a 50% improvement in conversions since the page is more relevant to what the searcher is looking for. This is critical in local markets to have not only their market page ranking but the one designated to do so. Imagine the frustration of an Australian searcher clicking a search result and being brought to a page in the US or UK that has a different currency and is not likely able to ship.
It is not uncommon to have older pages or random pages that outrank the desired page. By monitoring key pages, you can identify where the best page is not the page you want and make changes. If it is the wrong market, use hreflang, an old page, set a 301 redirect, and if a less optimal but necessary page, add a canonical tag.
For a UK-based travel site that was ranking #1 and getting around a 50% click rate on a specific keyword but was not getting any conversions. Quickly looking at the page, we found a “last year” offer page with no current offer, resulting in a 98% bounce rate on the page. A simple 301 redirect was added, resulting in $60k in new revenue in 10 days. ? This revenue would have been lost had they not identified that the desired PLP was not the page ranking.
Another example I often cite was from a meeting at HP where the SEO team asked me to talk to the accessories manager who was not interested in SEO. He insisted that the effort to rank well was a waste of time because for a few of his key products, despite ranking in the top positions, never sold a single problem so he would rather spend that money on agency fees and internal dev resources on paid search.
The moment I did a search for the product he mentioned the problem was immediately apparent. In the screen capture below, you will see the HP page ranking for the query in SERP snippets 3 and 4. The pages ranking were both product manuals in PDF format, which had no way of converting or even linking to a page to attempt to purchase. Ironically, there were a few “simple SEO reasons” why the page was not ranking. A “hotfix” was granted, the change was made that day, and the page was refreshed.
A few days later, the product page soon replaced the manual as the top-ranking page. By getting a page where a user can actually purchase ranking, not only did they get sales from the page but also saved a significant number of PPC clicks. This success converted this manager, who thought SEO was a waste of time, into one of the biggest organizational evangelists of its benefits.