An SEO landing page is a focused web page optimized to attract and convert visitors through SEO techniques. In 2024, creating one involves understanding current best practices and optimizing for both users and search engines. This article explores how to craft an effective SEO landing page that improves rankings and drives conversions.
The purpose of an SEO landing page is to turn visitors into leads or customers. It’s a fantastic way to raise the ranking of your website. You can target particular phrases and keywords that you want to rank for by making a landing page that is specially made for SEO. Here, we’ll talk about what is an SEO landing page and how to make an efficient one so you can improve your rankings.
What is a Landing Page?
A landing page refers to a web page created with the intention of turning visitors into clients, leads, or customers. A landing page’s primary goal is to convince visitors to perform a particular action, like submitting a form, buying something, or subscribing to a newsletter.
In digital marketing campaigns like PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, email marketing, and social media advertising, landing pages are frequently used. Instead of sending visitors to a website’s home page, these campaigns direct them to a specific landing page, which has a higher chance of turning them into leads or customers.
What Exactly is an SEO Landing Page?
An SEO landing page is a specialized web page developed with the single objective of raising the position of your website in search engine results pages (SERPs). Usually, it consists of carefully designed content that has been optimized for a particular set of keywords, meta descriptions, and titles. This guarantees that your website will be displayed when a person searches for those terms. For instance, if your website sells dog supplies, you could make an SEO landing page just for “dog beds”-related keywords.
Making a landing page that is informative and engaging for visitors is essential for effective SEO. Ensure your page’s content is pertinent, succinct, and includes the keywords you’re targeting. Additionally, divide the content into readable headlines and subheadings to help visitors find what they are looking for.
Important Components of an SEO-Friendly Landing Page
Landing pages are a crucial part of digital marketing campaigns, and optimizing their performance with landing page SEO is a crucial tactic. You can make a landing page more SEO-friendly by concentrating on these on-page components:
- Headline: As the first item visitors will see on a landing page, the headline is among the most crucial components of an SEO-optimized landing page. It should correctly reflect the content of your landing page and be crystal clear, succinct, and compelling.
- Content: The landing page’s content should be simple to read and comprehend. It should also be relevant to the offer, product, or service being promoted. Additionally, the content should contain strategically placed keywords.
- Images and videos: Including videos and images can increase the persuasiveness and engagement of a landing page. They ought to be performance-optimized for the web and pertinent to the deal or item being promoted.
- Call-to-action (CTA): The call-to-action needs to be distinct, obvious, and action-focused. The next step for the user should be clearly stated, such as “Sign Up Now,” “Buy Now,” or “Learn More.”
- Form: If your landing page has a form, it needs to be brief and simple to fill out. Additionally, it ought to be positioned above the fold so that users don’t have to scroll to the bottom to see it.
- Navigation: There shouldn’t be much navigation. Visitors shouldn’t be diverted from the landing page’s main objective.
- Social proof: Testimonials and other types of social proof can be used to increase credibility and trust among potential clients.
- Uniform resource locators (URL) structure: URLs should contain keywords that are pertinent to the landing page and be brief, descriptive, and easy to remember.
- Meta descriptions and title descriptions: Both of these elements need to be distinctive, evocative, and keyword-rich.
- Mobile optimization: Because more and more individuals are using their smartphones to access the internet, landing pages should be customized for mobile use.
- Loading speed: Visitors may not be patient enough to wait for a page to load, requiring landing pages to load quickly.
A Step-By-Step Guide on How to Build an SEO Landing Page
Building an SEO landing page usually entails a few steps. The following is a step-by-step guide to developing one.
Step 1: Define the goal of the landing page
It’s critical to comprehend the landing page’s goal before creating it. A landing page may be used to promote a product or service, collect leads, or send visitors to other pages on your website.
Step 2: Select a design template or develop a personalized layout
You can choose from a variety of templates that you can configure to match your brand and the objective of your page in many landing page software and website builders. You might think about hiring a marketing employee to handle all of your SEO tasks.
The page will be easy to navigate and understand if the layout is consistent and simple. Make sure the landing page is simple to scroll through, and use a font that is clear and easy to read.
Step 3: Make landing pages available on your own domain
To reap SEO benefits, you should have the landing pages published under your domain.
Many third-party service providers provide the option of publishing a landing page under their subdomain. However, your chances of attaining any rankings are slim to none if you utilize a third-party service to publish your landing page. This is not good for SEO.
Publishing your landing page under your domain or, even better, as a subfolder of your website is the most SEO-friendly method. This option is provided by many landing page design companies at an additional cost, but it is the best option.
Designing and hosting the landing page on your website is an even better alternative. If you use WordPress, for instance, you can design a unique page template and use it on a standard WordPress page. In this manner, the landing page will be a component of your website, share some of the trust and authority associated with your domain, and you won’t be required to pay monthly fees to outside providers. Additionally, since users don’t have to leave your website, this alternative increases user trust, which results in more conversions. Finally, both SEO and conversions benefit, making it a win-win situation.
Step 4: Optimize the URLs of your landing pages
A landing page’s URL should follow all guidelines for search engine-friendly URLs. This implies that:
- It must be succinct and direct. Both users and search engines are confused by long URLs.
- It must contain keywords. – Use the targeted keywords, but avoid stuffing the page with them.
- Use “-” to denote word breaks.
- The URLs of landing pages must be brief and easy to remember in order to make sense when shared on social media or in forums.
Step 5: Create https landing pages
Since Google uses https in their ranking algorithm, having an SSL connected to your landing pages will give you a minor comparative ranking boost.
Additionally, it’s another way to let visitors know that your website can be trusted with their financial and personal information.
Step 6: Choose the keywords that you want to rank for
Knowing the keywords you want a page to rank for is an important step in SEO optimization for any page.
Because the SEO keywords must match the copy on the landing page, this task is a little more challenging when it is about landing page SEO. The best strategy is to:
- First, draft your landing page copy without using or considering keywords
- Next, choose the keywords you would like your page to target
- Finally, thoughtfully place the keywords on your page
Researching keywords for landing pages
Once you have your copy ready, let’s look at how you can determine which keywords to optimize the landing pages for.
Approach 1
The first step is to visit your preferred keyword research tool and conduct a keyword search for phrases associated with your content.
Despite the fact that for many this may seem obvious, what you are looking for at this point are keywords you can actually rank highly for on Google rather than keywords you would like you could rank highly for. What sets these two apart from one another? Everyone wants their landing pages to rank for extremely competitive keywords, but this is impossible unless your website is extremely robust.
Approach 2
Analysis of the keywords that drive traffic to websites that are already appearing in Google’s top positions is a second way to find keywords to utilize in your optimization process.
Step 7: Optimize your on-page SEO
The next step is to incorporate those keywords into your landing page once you are certain of the search terms for which you want the page to rank. The steps to take are as follows and are referred to as on-page SEO:
Incorporate keywords into your title tag
- Every single web page that has been published has a title tag.
- This is what is displayed in the search engine results pages—not necessarily what is displayed on the page itself.
- You must use your primary keyword or close variants in the title tag.
Add keywords to the meta descriptions
- In order to motivate visitors to click on your snippet and go to your website, it is crucial to include relevant keywords in the meta description as well as make them interesting.
- Incorporate keywords or close variations in the main heading and subheadings.
- The H1 tag is typically the same as the page title, and this is acceptable. You could use different keywords in the H1 tag for better optimization.
- A perfect landing page should have several sections, each with an H2 heading, and any sub-sections with an H3 heading. Also, include keywords in these.
Step 8: Optimize for content SEO
The page’s actual content is another thing that needs to be optimized.
To begin with, your landing page must contain text content in addition to images and videos. Compared to videos or images, text content is easier for search engines to understand. You can add the text content you require to follow SEO landing page best practices without ruining the design.
Adhere to these basic rules:
- Try to add a few lines of text content at the top of the page. This serves to clearly convey the page’s subject matter to both users and search engines.
- Publish more textual material after your main offering. In order for users to see the main offer as soon as they land on the page, landing pages typically display it above the fold.
Use accordions with caution
Verify that crucial text is not tucked away in accordions. Although accordions are very helpful, especially on mobile devices, it’s best to only use them when absolutely necessary.
Include latent semantic indexing keywords in your writing
Latent Semantic Index (LSI) keywords refer to phrases with the same meaning as the target keywords. You can find and use LSI keywords to enhance your copy, rather than using the same keywords repeatedly and running the risk of having a keyword-stuffed copy.
Step 9: Optimize Videos and Images
Make sure these components are placed on the page in a way that is SEO-friendly.
If your landing page contains videos, ensure that: Videos are delivered from a third-party service, such as Vimeo or YouTube. Videos typically take up several MBs, so using a streaming platform is more beneficial than downloading them from your server.
To provide search engine bots with more information about your videos, add video schema to each and every one of them.
Image SEO
Three aspects of every image must be optimized:
Filename – Use logical filenames for your files that relate to the image itself.
ALT Text – The most crucial component for image SEO is ALT Text. You need to have a purposeful ALT Text for every image. When images are disabled, the ALT text is displayed in the browser and is what search engines use to determine what an image is about. Try to naturally incorporate keywords into your ALT text when writing it.
Image captions – These can be added for each image and can be similar to the ALT text but provide a little more information.
Step 10: Incorporate Structured Data Markup
Structured data markup is available for images too. Depending on the product or service you are selling, you can use a variety of schemas on your landing page.
Schemas can enhance the way your search snippet is presented and raise the page’s search engine ranking.
You can provide search engines with more information about what you are selling, the costs, whether there are any in stock, and a lot of other helpful information by using schemas.
Step 11: Optimize for Mobile
For obvious reasons, your SEO landing page will almost certainly receive more mobile traffic than desktop traffic. This implies that you must ensure that the page is optimized for mobile devices in order to follow SEO best practices.
Make sure the following is true for mobile-friendly SEO landing pages:
- Mobile pages don’t require horizontal scrolling
- They load quickly
- They contain all of the information on the desktop page
- They look great at various resolutions
- Popups and other irritating features for mobile users are absent
Step 12: Optimize for Speed
Faster-loading pages have a higher chance of being ranked than slower ones. Speed is even more crucial for landing pages because it can influence sales and conversions.
For an SEO-friendly landing page, here are some simple tips:
- Compress all of your images using image optimization software. Images can be significantly compressed in size while maintaining their quality using software.
- Utilize a CDN, minify your JS and CSS, and use caching plugins.
Use a streaming service like YouTube instead of adding videos to your website, and host your landing pages and website there instead of using shared hosting.
Step 13: Include links directing traffic to your SEO landing page
Links can improve your landing page even more. We’ll examine three areas where you should put your energy: 301 redirects, backlinks, and internal links.
Internal links
An internal link refers to a link referring to a page within the same domain.
The most valued pages of a website are those that have the most internal links, and having more of these can help your SEO.
Here is what you should do:
- Include links in your blog posts
- Utilize keywords in the internal links’ anchor text to let Google know which keywords you want your landing page to rank for
- Add a link referring to your landing page from the homepage
- Add links pointing to the landing page in the sidebar and footer
Get backlinks by promoting your SEO landing pages
In addition to internal promotion, you must also advertise your landing pages online in order to build backlinks.
If you are acquainted with off-page SEO landing page techniques, you already know that obtaining high-quality links can be challenging, particularly when promoting sales pages and landing pages.
What is the remedy? Use other strategies, such as guest posting, linking from your blog to other websites, getting published on media pages, and launching an affiliate program, as a workaround to acquire those valuable links.
301 redirects to help you amalgamate your SEO landing page efforts
A landing page’s primary objective is to boost conversions. It is typical for the page’s content to change during this process, and new pages may even be created entirely from scratch.
Each time you do this, you lose the credibility and backlinks you have earned through SEO, which is bad for SEO. What is the remedy? Every time you make a new landing page for the exact same goods or services, use 301 redirects. 301 redirects tell search engines to pass SEO value from a URL to another. You can include 301 redirects in your “.htaccess” file or CMS with a plugin.
This will prevent any broken links from forming and will also help to consolidate your SEO efforts. Any internal links, bookmarks, backlinks, and social media mentions will all redirect automatically to the new landing page.
Final thoughts
The above recommendations will result in landing pages that are optimized for search engines. This translates into the ability to increase conversions by directing targeted organic traffic to your pages. We hope that with this information, you can create an SEO landing page for your business.