An effective digital marketing strategy needs to incorporate the strategic use of landing pages to do things like help drive conversion events, target specific customer demographics, and perform insightful analytics. If you have a webpage that isn’t performing well in the SERPs, then you won’t get conversions through that landing page.
It’s ultimately a waste of time, money, and space if nobody can find it. It can also be ineffective for analytics purposes if a landing page is drawing in the wrong demographic users.
So, it’s not just a matter of having landing pages and using them with reckless abandon. They also need to be strategically positioned with industry-best practices to maximize their effective value.
What Does an SEO Landing Page Do?
A properly constructed SEO landing page might seem simple, but it actually does a lot of things that prove its value. This includes things like
- Optimizing your use of keywords
- Helping search engines accurately interpret your content structure
- Monitor page speeds
- Helping to build backlinks
- Optimizing site navigation
A properly constructed SEO landing page uses targeted keywords to help it rank well while also providing a clear call-to-action (CTA). A lot of SEO landing pages are used as part of a larger inbound marketing campaign, to increase your share of the active search traffic within your industry niche.
By its nature, an SEO landing page’s most important characteristic is its form, which is carefully crafted to capture visitor information. This requires an effective landing page to be direct in its communication style as well as clear about how it provides an overall positive user experience.
Getting Your Landing Page to Perform in SERPs
One of the best ways to get your website to perform well in SERPs is to focus on optimizing all your new content as well as your current existing content to rank well in organic searches. This is especially important for target SEO landing pages, where click-through rates and conversions often hinge on high-quality content. This means you need to create content that is easy to audit to be able to accurately determine if your existing landing pages are properly optimized.
Tips for SEO Landing Page Best Practices
SEO landing page best practices rely on several key factors to help them rank higher in popular search engines like Google. By employing some of the following SEO best practice tips when creating your strategically targeted landing pages you increase your chances of attracting people who are truly interested in your product or service.
Use an Effective Keyword Strategy
An effective keyword strategy serves as the foundation for a successful landing page. This starts with selecting long-tail keywords while also focusing on search intent. You can then use those keywords in the content in a way that feels organic as well as logical. Just be sure to always remember to write for human readers over bots who are wary of keyword stuffing.
Make It Easy For Search Engines To Understand Your Content’s Structure
Optimizing an SEO landing page requires more than just the strategic use of long-tail keywords. Your content also needs to be structured in a way that makes it easy for search engine bots to read, quickly analyze, and recognize. This translates to better indexing, which further boosts your overall organic ranking.
This includes strategically using specific tags within your site structure. Such as:
The Title Tag
The title tag of the SEO landing page needs to be short as well as include high-quality keywords. It often helps to place the keyword to the left of the page title with the less important words last.
The Alt Tag
Alt tags can often be added to images in HTML to help describe the content in a way that search engine bots can easily read and accurately interpret. If the image can’t load properly due to some type of technical glitch, the alt tag will still appear ensuring that the bots will index it correctly. The best Alt Tags often include a brief description of the image along with its context.
The Meta Description
An SEO landing page’s Meta description has a strong influence on how it ranks in organic searches. A properly crafted meta description helps convince a user to click on a search engine result. This often means writing a succinct and to-the-point meta telling users what they will find on the landing page.
The Use of Content Headings
Content headings such as the H1, H2, and H3 tags not only help break up other content into easy-to-digest bites but also provide an opportunity to use secondary keywords in secondary headers.
Thoughtful Use of Images & Videos
Strategically adding images and videos helps demonstrate to search engines that your content is valuable. Just be sure to label the files appropriately using primary keywords in the file name, title, and the obligatory alt tag.
The Strategic Use of Internal Links
Relevant internal links are a helpful way to use targeted anchor text. Ideally, you want the linked page’s primary keywords as the anchor text. This further helps search engines interpret the intent, context, and content of the landing page.
Creating an Effective URL for an SEO Landing Pages
The URL you use for an SEO landing page is also a strong factor that will influence its ranking as well as how it connects with your demographic target market. Ideally, you want to communicate information about the content that users will find on the page.
This means that the URL needs to also reflect the rest of the overall site structure and that the content within fits into your overall website. It’s best to keep the SEO landing page’s URL short with no more than 65 characters. If you need to, you can use slashes to separate concepts.
It’s important to consider that the URL informs not only search engine bots that crawl your page but also potential users. A person can identify the general category or a landing page while understanding the subcategory that this specific page addresses in the meta description. At the same time, a search engine bot can also evaluate the intent of the page to index and determine its ranking potential.
Optimize the Page Loading Speed
One of the more overlooked aspects of crafting an effective SEO landing page is page speed. A fast-loading page is more likely to provide a user-friendly experience. This is something that will be noted by search engine algorithms as well as by users who are trying to access the page.
Build High-Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are an effective way to connect your website to other platforms. These days search engine algorithms prioritize high-quality backlinks from respected, authoritative, high-ranking websites when it comes to ranking your SEO landing page. One of the best ways to do this is to engage in link exchanges or to cite your sources from high-quality industry-leading sites.
