Make Your Landing Pages SEO-Friendly

There’s no denying that the main purpose of landing pages is usually to drive conversions.

If you have a paid advertising or email campaign, you need a relevant page to convert users who click through.

However, that’s not to say landing pages can’t also be SEO-friendly.

If you do it right, it’s possible to strike a balance that lets your landing page rank in the Google search results without compromising on conversions.

Develop a keyword strategy

Keywords are the building block of any SEO strategy. How can you rank if you don’t know what you want to rank for?

Try to brainstorm the most relevant keywords for your landing page. Ask yourself what people would search for to find your page.

Once you have a few ideas in mind, use a keyword research tool such as Google Keyword Planner (it’s free!) to check search volumes and to see how much competition there is to rank for your keywords.

In an ideal world, you would like high search volume and low competition, but this can be hard to come by. When starting out, it is best to aim for medium search volumes that will bring traffic but aren’t so competitive that it’s impossible to rank.

If you think your keywords might be too competitive, try some longtail alternatives.

Longtail keywords are more specific, such as ‘pure cotton t-shirt’ instead of just ‘t-shirt’, and often have higher search intent (searchers are looking for something in particular rather than just browsing).

Avoid keyword cannibalisation

If you are planning on optimising a few different landing pages, try to plan your keywords ahead of time to avoid overlap.

Targeting the same or similar keywords on different pages can lead to what’s known as keyword cannibalisation: essentially competing with yourself in the search results and ultimately making it less likely either landing page will rank.

Include keywords on your landing page (but don’t go overboard!)

Once you have chosen your keywords, you need to put them in a few different places on your page in order to signify to Google what your page is about and give you a chance of ranking in the search results.

Try not to go overboard with your keyword, as this can look spammy and make your copy look unnatural to the reader.

Remember, you are trying to strike a balance between conversion rate optimisation and SEO with your landing page, so it’s essential not to compromise the user experience in order to rank.

In most cases, including your keyword in the page title, URL, meta description and a few times in the copy (preferably near the beginning) should suffice.

Content length: long or short?

Conversion-focused pages tend to be very light on content. Marketers design these pages to have minimal distractions and to drive users towards their call to action.

SEO-friendly landing pages, on the other hand, tend to have high word counts.

Though it’s suspected to be more correlation than causation, Google does appear to favour high word counts when deciding its rankings.

Whether it’s a direct ranking factor or not, the first-page search results for most queries are 2,000 words on average, suggesting more content is essential if you want to rank.

But how do you do this without compromising on conversions?

It’s true that you definitely don’t want to turn your landing page into a full-length blog post that will lack relevance and distract users.

Try to keep the focus on your calls to action, with additional content further down the page for those who wish to learn more.

Keep the content directly related to the topic of the landing page, and keep it broken up and readable.

Check your page speed

Making sure your landing page and its content load quickly is a good idea for both conversion rate optimisation and SEO.

You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to see how your website currently measures up and get suggestions on how to speed things up.

Having a fast-loading landing page is crucial. Not only is page speed a direct Google ranking factor, but users are also less likely to convert if they are forced to wait for a slow-loading landing page.

A one-second load time delay can reduce your conversion rate by 7%.

Improving your landing page’s loading time is really a no-brainer, as it could both boost your position on the search engine results page and help convert traffic into customers.

Build backlinks to your landing pages

Building high-quality backlinks is one of the best ways to improve your chances of ranking.

Links from websites with a high domain authority (sites that search engines consider to be trustworthy and authoritative) signal to Google that your landing page is relevant and of good quality.

The best way to build backlinks is to have excellent, original content that other sites will want to link to.

However, it can be hard to attract links to landing pages, especially if you are a small business, so you might want to consider reaching out to websites directly.

For example, you could contact blogs related to your industry offering to write guest posts, in which you would include a link to your landing page.

Keep landing pages up to date

Keeping your landing pages up to date is good practice for both conversion rate optimisation and SEO.

Both Google and its searchers love fresh content, so updating your landing pages regularly is an easy win on both of these fronts.

Also, if you have temporary seasonal or promotional landing pages (e.g. a dedicated landing page for a Black Friday sale), try to keep these up and simply update them, rather than starting from scratch with new pages and losing any links and authority you may have built up.

Summary

It’s definitely wise to optimise your landing pages for conversions, but it doesn’t hurt to make things SEO-friendly as well.

After all, you’re more likely to get conversions if you are getting increased traffic from ranking in the search results!

Our tips should help you to improve your landing page SEO without compromising on user experience and conversions.

Need more advice on landing page SEO? We’ve got you covered. Contact us for a free consultation and we can discuss all of your digital marketing needs.