This is a sponsored post written by Rank Ranger. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
You want to optimize your landing pages so they rank successfully. Doing so is an essential goal – but it’s also a lot more complicated than it sounds.
We’ve spent countless hours thinking of ways to offer you SEO reports that allow you to approach landing page optimization with methodical precision.
Here’s how.
Step 1: Set Target URLs to Track Specific Landing Pages
Tracking domains is the backbone of a landing page strategy. But it has to be done right.
We highly recommend you set up target URLs within your campaign to start tracking your landing pages. There’s no sense in making more work for yourself. By implementing the target URL option within Rank Ranger, determining landing page wins is infinitely simplified.
In this regard, how the sites that you’re tracking are structured all fall under Rank Ranger’s purview.
The unique Rank Ranger features available to you within our target URL option can track a subdomain or even use wildcards to track any sort of directory.
Tracking Target URLs to zero in on landing page performance
Step 2: Track Landing Page Rank with a Multi-Layered Approach
With target URLs set up, use the Rank Tracker Dashboard to determine if the corresponding URL is your highest ranking page for a given keyword. Doing so should be easily determinable and unequivocal (which is why we decided on a highly visual indicator).
Multi-layered Rank Dashboard with SERP Snapshots
If you’re serious about achieving landing page success, making this determination is just the first step. That is, qualifying the success of the targeted URL is a must. This means a comprehensive rank analysis that includes:
- Multi-layered rank tracking (which should incorporate an overall visibility score)
- Competition analysis
- SERP feature scorings
In other words, the point is not to simply see if the target URL you set up is your top page for a given keyword, but to qualify the page’s performance from multiple vantage points.
Step 3: Analyze Landing Page Fluctuations Religiously
It’s important to keep in mind that even if the targeted URL is not your highest ranking page for the keyword, it does not mean that you are not ranking within the top 500 results. Rather, it simply means it is not your highest ranking page.
Google, in theory, may be ranking another of your landing pages higher for the keyword. It could then very well be that your landing page is ranking quite well, just not as well as another one of your pages.
With this, monitoring landing page fluctuations is the natural next step in moving a landing page up the SERP. This is true even if you see that your targeted landing page is currently your highest ranking page for a keyword (i.e., you’ve met your target URL goal).
Just because a specific landing page is your top SERP performer now doesn’t mean it always was and always will be.
Landing Page Monitor includes landing page fluctuation graph & metrics table with SERP features]
Properly tracking a landing page means carefully monitoring landing page fluctuations on a per keyword basis.
Here, too, qualifying performance is the name of the game.
Seeing how long Google ranks another landing page above the one you’ve optimized for the keyword will help you understand how pervasive the fluctuation is, as will tracking how often a fluctuation occurs.
Of course, as a Google algorithm update rolls out you’ll want to pay even closer attention so as to monitor if any of your landing pages have been impacted, with Google giving new preference to another one of your pages.
Step 4: Survey the Full Ranking Impact of Your Landing Pages
A solid landing page, at its optimization peak, is going to rank for more than one keyword. This is quite common, and in some industries (think e-commerce) it’s prevalent.
When you’re in the process of updating a page, taking the full ranking picture into consideration can have big payoffs, especially if the page is ranking towards the top of the SERP for a good few keywords.
In order to accurately gauge the broad and overall health of a landing page, seeing its full performance across all of its ranking keywords offers a significant advantage.
You’ll want to see the day by day performance for all of a landing page’s ranking keywords both before and after making a strategic change to the page. That is, before making a change to a landing page, you’ll want to consider how it may impact the other keywords the page currently ranks well for.
Of course, after adjusting a landing page you’ll want to see the impact not only on the page’s top keyword but also the other keywords the page does well with. It may be worth it to sacrifice a position or two for a given keyword if it will boost your page’s ranking for a multitude of other keywords.
Landing Page Daily Snapshot monitors the keywords that a landing page ranked for over time
Step 5: Meta Maneuvers for Top Ranking Landing Pages
Having deep insights into a landing page fluctuations, along with knowing the ranking depth of a landing page, puts you on the doorstep of developing an actual landing page strategy.
A lot has already been said about the role of on-page optimization. However, even within on-page optimization there other factors at play that don’t draw as much attention as they should.
Think a bit outside of the box and undertake a concerted effort to optimize meta-structure, such as the page’s title and meta description.
Properly optimizing a page’s title tag and meta description can be a bit elusive.
For example, the length (in pixels) Google allows before truncation varies across the world and even across various niches.
Beyond that, knowing exactly which keywords and phraseology will have the greatest impact on Google’s crawlers is not anywhere near being an exact science.
Fortunately, you need not reinvent the wheel. Rather than making guesswork out of the process, look at the competition.
- What keywords are they using in their titles and meta-descriptions?
- What changes have they made?
- How has Google responded to these changes in terms of rank?
You need a tool that tracks all of this for you.
SEO Monitor with in-depth analysis of the top 20 competitors per keyword including title & description changes made by competitors
Step 6: Measure Landing Pages Success in Real Terms
Landing page optimization may be a page by page process, but landing page success pertains to all of your landing pages.
Proficiency in optimizing a landing page is best done in the context of an overall landing page strategy. Evaluating this strategy on a page by page basis simply isn’t effective.
Successfully assess your landing page optimization strategy by looking at the overall trends of your pages across the board. You’ll be best served by isolating rank trends across all of your active landing pages.
Seeing an overall trend up the SERP can soundly determine the positive impact of your overall optimization efforts.
This shouldn’t be limited to just rank, however.
Rank is only a means to an end and the impact of your landing page optimization is often best judged by user behavior. To that extent, it’s important to view landing page rank changes in the context of both the data found in Google’s Analytics and Search Console. Meaning, how has your strategy not only increased rank but traffic, clicks, CTR, etc.
Having rank and user-oriented data in one place is a win-win.
Landing Page Traffic Insights report – search traffic and user behavior from Google Analytics and Search Console together in one report
Rank Ranger: A Partner, Not Just a Platform
From your first steps toward landing page success to the moment you plant your flag on top of the SERP, Rank Ranger will be with you at every moment and help you overcome every challenge to reach your ranking goals.
With a prolific series of landing page reports and tools that not only offer a profoundly far-reaching look at landing page performance but present unique data not found anywhere else on the market, Rank Ranger puts your pages in position to win.
See for yourself, and we’ll see you at the top of the SERP!
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by Rank Ranger. Used with permission.
In-post Images: Images by Rank Ranger. Used with permission.