Landing pages are probably the most important pages you have on your website. It is, therefore, essential you get the design of them as good as possible. However, there is no point having a fantastic landing page if nobody ever looks at it. For that, you need landing page SEO.
In other words, optimizing your landing pages not only for conversions, but also to ensure you get as much traffic from Google and other search engines as possible.
The following five landing page hacks will increase your rankings quickly and effectively.
- Optimize the URL
It’s hard to believe, but there are still websites with URLs that are not SEO-friendly. This is understandable if you have a huge website like Amazon and need to use long and complex URLs to categories and index your content.
For most small and medium-sized businesses in New Zealand, however, this is not necessary. Instead, your URL should be simple and relevant, and it should contain the landing page’s main focus keyword.
SEO agencies usually achieve this by matching the URL to the page’s title, providing the page’s title includes the main keyword, of course.
- Optimize the Metadata and Content
Optimizing all the content related to your landing page is important. This includes:
- The page title – as mentioned above
- The meta description of the page
- The header tags
- The text in the first paragraph
- The text on the rest of the page
Optimizing these various content elements includes making sure they are structured properly. Also, all the above elements of your landing page’s content should contain the main keyword of the page. Most of the elements, including some of the sub-headings and the main text on the page (below the first paragraph), should also contain secondary and other related keywords.
- The Importance of Content Readability
Many of the people who will visit your website will scan the content on your pages rather than reading each page line by line. This is just the way the web works.
You need to write in a way that facilitates this type of reading. This involves using the following techniques:
- Write short paragraphs
- Use everyday language
- Use short, simple sentence structures
- Add lots of sub-headings to break up the text
- Add lists
This is important for usability but it also has an impact on SEO. This is because a visitor who thinks your page is too difficult, complicated, or time-consuming to read is likely to leave it quickly. This could increase your bounce rate which is not good for SEO.
Remember, though, readability means making text easy to read, not shortening the content on the page.
- Add Media
Keeping users on your landing pages is good for conversions as the longer they spend digesting the content, the more likely they are to convert.
Also, as we have seen above, keeping users on your landing pages is good for SEO. This is because one of Google’s main areas of focus is user satisfaction. In other words, it wants people using its search engine to find the information they want. If someone visits a page and then leaves again quickly, there is a strong likelihood they didn’t find what they were looking for on the page.
By adding media – such as a video – you encourage people to stay on your landing page, helping to boost its SEO.
- Create Internal Links to the Page
Internal linking should be an essential part of any SEO service or strategy that you use for your website. This applies to landing pages as much as any other page.
Internal linking helps with SEO in several different ways. This includes helping Google find all the pages on your website, plus it improves Google’s understanding of the content on your page and how that content connects with the rest of your website.
Importantly, though, internal linking passes on link juice.
Link juice is a bit of jargon that SEO agencies use, but the concept is a simple one. Google uses links a bit like votes for a website page. In other words, when a website links to your page, Google treats that link as a vote for your page, i.e. the website linking to you chose your page instead of all the other pages it could have linked to.
Links are not static, however. This is where the term “link juice” comes from. It means a proportion of the positive SEO impact of links to a page can be passed onto any other page it then goes on to link to.
Let’s look at an example. Say you write a blog that gets a lot of traction on social media which, in turn, generates links. In other words, several websites link to your blog giving it “link juice”. If that blog contains an internal link to your landing page, some of the blog’s “link juice” will be passed to the landing page.
Landing Page SEO
There are lots of other things you can do to improve the SEO of your landing pages, including building backlinks to the landing pages directly. That said, the above five hacks will generate fast and effective SEO results.
Raphael Garcia is just getting his start a reporter. He attended a technical school while still in high school where he learned a variety of skills, from photography to car mechanics. Brian also helps keep The Marketing Folks social media feeds up-to-date.