A Guide To Creating SEO-Friendly Landing Pages

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You probably know that a website is one of the must-haves for any business or brand.

But did you know that if you’re not using landing pages properly, you might be missing out on valuable search engine optimization (SEO) benefits and conversion opportunities?

In digital marketing, landing pages are where a visitor “lands” when they click through to your site from a promotional post on social media or a search engine listing.

Landing pages are focused, targeted, and created to generate conversions.

Because landing pages sit at a critical point in the marketing funnel, they are crucial to your lead generation and conversion strategy.

Therefore, they should receive a commensurate level of attention.

In this article, we’re going to look at SEO-friendly landing pages.

We’ll also look at a few tips you can implement to create a landing page that Google will love.

Let’s dive in!

1. What are SEO-Friendly Landing Pages?

You want your landing page to drive conversion events at a high rate. For that to happen, it has to be SEO-optimized.

A good SEO-friendly landing page is one that incorporates a clear keyword strategy and aims to:

Rank as high as possible for your chosen keywords
Capture and retain a desirable portion of the search share for its niche
Provide an overall positive and direct user experience
Generate sales and conversions

An SEO-friendly landing page is direct and to the point.

It places emphasis on the relevant value proposition and the final call to action.

In other words, it is entirely oriented towards driving a conversion.

2. Why Is It Important to Optimize Your Landing Page?

Usually, a landing page forms part of a larger inbound marketing strategy that aims at funneling neutral visitors and making them subscribers, customers, or clients.

If these people can’t find your landing page, then you have a problem.

Let’s take fitness brand Peloton’s landing page as an example:

It is a simple yet outstanding landing page. Here, the company captures the attention of a fitness-savvy audience with concise copy, a compelling price offer, stunning graphics, and engaging customer journeys.

But all of these elements will be for nothing if no one can find the landing page online.

In short, SEO is critical because it brings a considerable amount of visibility to your landing page.

It gives you the platform you need to attract the right people to your page at the right time.

3. How to Create an SEO-Friendly Landing Page

The good news is, anyone can create an SEO-friendly landing page.

Contrary to popular perception, you don’t need as much technical knowledge to come up with one.

Here’s how to go about optimizing your landing page for search engines:

3.1. Determine Your Keywords

Keywords are a core part of any search engine optimization drive.

Here, you decide - using a carefully thought out strategy - the words for which you want your page to rank on search engine results.

A snapshot of Google Keyword Planner

Just adding popular niche-related buzzwords isn’t enough. You need to conduct rigorous research to determine what keywords are right for your product or service.

Important to keyword strategy are long-tail keywords. These are phrasal combinations that users might specifically search for on Google.

For example, a long-tail keyword for a bicycle brand might be “sports bicycles”.

Generally, long-tail keywords rank better on results pages than single-word or generic keywords. They also generate higher returns on marketing investments.

There are multiple keyword research tools available for you to use. While they mostly look and function similarly, make sure always to pick the SEO tool whose feature set matches your preferences.

3.2. Include Keywords in Your Copy

When you’re done crafting an effective keyword strategy, the next thing to do is to include the keywords in your landing page copy.

To reap the best SEO benefits from your landing page strategy, here are a few of the best places to put them:

Header tags: Many newbie content marketers ignore the importance of header tags as part of comprehensive landing page SEO. As a general rule of thumb, always have only one H1 tag on your landing page. This is because webpages - and search engines by extension - rank headings and subheadings in a hierarchy from H1 to H6 - with the former having the highest weight.
Meta descriptions: If you’ve ever seen a short blurb of text under the main title of search engine results, this is a meta description. A meta description is a short synopsis of the page’s content for searchers. It allows them to decide if your landing page content is valuable to their search query.
Title tag:This is the blue, emboldened text right above the meta description on search engine result pages. Because this is the first bit of text users will come across after searching for related queries, you must make sure that your title tag is as compelling as possible in order to encourage click-throughs.

Make sure you also incorporate the keywords seamlessly into your content.

Don’t overdo it, though.

Google penalizes sites caught resorting to keyword stuffing.

3.3. Publish a Customised URL

Search engine authority is a website feature you don’t want to miss out on, however easier the alternatives might be.

By customizing the URL of your landing page, you’re putting down a distinct brand identifier that can easily be picked up by search engines as they index web content.

If you’re using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, for instance, you have the option to either publish to a subdomain or register one of your own. Always choose the latter.

Using your own domain allows your landing page to rank better, especially for brand-related keywords.

Some of the best domain name services (or DNS) providers for SEO-focused brands are Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cloudflare.

These allow you a full suite of features including the ability to use custom URLs and extensive support of most of the best hosting platforms around.

3.4. Secure Relevant Backlinks

Backlinking is key to optimizing your landing page for SEO.

Having other trustworthy sites provide a digital vote of confidence by linking to your landing page signals to Google your authoritativeness, trustworthiness, and reliability.

The launching point to getting these backlinks is writing great guest posts.

Try to cover a subject area that is both relevant to the target website and your landing page. This makes your eventual backlinks natural and valuable to the content.

That’s something that Google places at the forefront of its backlink assessment.

Always ensure that your content is factual, engaging, informative, and well researched.

Chances are, most people that will come across the piece are well-informed individuals looking for new ways to approach a concept.

They will be more receptive to articles that are rooted in data and research.

While the practice is simple enough, the process of getting these backlinks live on reputable websites requires a lot of pitching, guest posting, and editing.

Don’t be dismayed if these publications don’t accept the first proposal; they usually uphold a stringent set of guest posting guidelines and can be swayed by constant improvement.

If you’re still not sure how to go about reaching out to these high-value publications for backlinks, this genius strategy implemented by Fractl allowed the company to secure links from reputable publications like Wired, Upworthy, and TIME.

Take notes from Fractl’s approach and use it as a guide to strategizing your backlink drive.

3.5. Ensure Your Landing Page Loads Quickly

Google takes landing page load speed into account as it ranks pages for relevance.

While this factor has little to do with the value of the actual content on the page - or its relevance - Google does this to ensure that the highest-ranking landing pages provide an enjoyable browsing experience for users.

Many popular SEO tools now account for load speeds as well.

Google has confirmed it uses this metric to rank pages on search engine results pages.

And 40% of internet users abandon a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load.

Speeding up your landing page is a must.

A great place to start is by connecting it to Google PageSpeed Insights.

This tool analyses your landing page load speeds and measures the results against industry averages.

If your landing page is not quite up to par, consider implementing tweaks such as:

Using lighter images where possible (without compromising quality)
Overhauling the page’s HTML and CSS code to reduce its megabyte count
Doing away with all the in-page extensions and plug-ins not currently in use
Switching to a better web host with faster hosting architecture

Many factors bulk up a landing page’s size and lead to slow load speeds.

Ensure you get your page load times within the industry average as it gives your overall SEO a huge boost.

4. Conclusion

Landing pages are critical to generating leads and conversions.

But even if you invest in a top-notch copy, engaging pictures, and use an array of tools, you won’t succeed if you don’t cover your SEO bases.

In other words, creating SEO-friendly landing pages is key.

Optimizing your landing page for search engines like Google ensures that enough of your target demographic makes it onto your landing page for conversions.

In this article, we’ve walked you through how to create SEO-friendly landing pages.

Now it’s over to you. Put in the effort, invest some time, and stick with it.

You’ll soon see excellent results.

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