Reliance on Google or Adobe Analytics in marketing is often high. Too high. The wealth of data it gives us is often lacking in context or limited in perspective.
Take PDF documents as an example. People look at the events tracked in Analytics which show how many people clicked into those downloadable forms or reports. However, this doesn’t tell us how often they were visited direct.
Try opening Google Search Console’s performance report and filtering pages for any that contain “.pdf”. You might be surprised how much traffic goes directly to these files from Google’s search results. If traffic to landing pages has dropped, that could be where it’s gone.
So, should we take steps to remove the PDF from search engines and force users to the landing page? Probably not.
Think about why this happens. The PDF file itself is often a better result for the user keyword than its corresponding landing page. For example, keywords including “application form” or “report” signal an intent to access those documents. For search engines, it’s better for their users to remove one click from the journey if that click is just navigational. Removing the best result on your site from search indexes might open the window for competitors to gain that ranking. Instead, consider where that content is best served. Usability experts often recommend following a simple rule of thumb – if it’s intended to be read on screen, it should be in a web page. Just keep in mind that some users will want to download and print – not all websites have their designs configured to support this. At the same time, providing options for both is fine and very unlikely to harm SEO.
Further reading:
What is SEO Word of the Week?
Once I week, usually on a Monday, I post on LinkedIn about a SEO topic of interest (to me, at least) that allows me to share some knowledge in a format that’s easier to digest, and to write. This could be anything from a concept within search engine algorithms or systems to ideas that marketers can act on. I’ve also decided to collect these posts here to keep an archive that people can refer to without having to sift through the rest of my feed.