Although landing pages are frequently conversion-focused, this does not mean that they shouldn’t also be SEO-focused.
A landing page that has been optimized for SEO may rank highly in Google, which will increase traffic and conversions.
This post will define landing page SEO and provide a checklist for you to use to make sure your landing pages are optimized for both conversions and search engines.
What is a landing page?
The first page visitors should see when they arrive at your website is called a landing page.
Since people land on this page after entering the domain name in a browser, the homepage is frequently the landing page for many websites.
A landing page would be the page you desire consumers to see when they click on an advertisement (internal or external) from one of your campaigns in the context of digital marketing.
Landing pages have a clear function. Typically, they lack all the components of a typical page but are nonetheless structured and designed to encourage readers to take a particular action (submit a form, buy a product or service, etc.)
Read More:How to Become a Content Writer in 2023
What are SEO Landing pages?
SEO landing pages include all of the qualities of a landing page, such as being primarily designed for conversions while also being SEO-friendly.
As we’ll see below, optimizing a landing page for search engines is simple, particularly if you have an SEO approach.
When should your landing pages NOT be optimized?
However, there are times when improving a landing page isn’t really worth the effort and time.
For instance, if you plan to create a landing page for a brief campaign or to test a concept, you can avoid the SEO section because the page would be temporary.
In most circumstances, though, completing SEO work on your landing pages will:
- Enhance your chances of ranking higher for the keywords you want.
- It helps with branding.
- It improves the user experience because SEO techniques can make a page more user-friendly.
How to build SEO Friendly Landing Pages
To SEO optimize your landing pages, take the following steps:
Publish landing pages to your own domain
This is the first and most critical action to take.
To achieve any SEO benefits, the landing pages must be hosted on your own domain.
If you use a third-party provider to host your landing page, your chances of attaining rankings are limited to none.
This is bad for SEO.
The most SEO-friendly method is to host your landing pages on your own domain, i.e.
my-landing-page.vh-info.com, or even better, vhinfo.com/my-landing-page
Most landing page design services charge a fee for this option, but it is the best way to proceed.
An even better option is to build and publish the landing page on your own website.
For example, if you’re using WordPress, you may develop a custom page template and use it on a regular WordPress site.
In this approach, the landing page will be a part of your website, retain some of your domain’s credibility and authority, and you will not be paying third-party services a monthly charge.
Furthermore, keeping the landing page on your domain boosts user trust because consumers do not have to leave your website, which leads to more conversions.
In the end, it’s a big win for both SEO and conversions.
Optimize your landing page URLs
A URL of a landing page must follow all SEO-friendly URL standards.
To put it another way, it must be:
- Brief and to the point – Long URLs both mislead search engines and users.
- Include keywords – Include keywords that you wish to target, but refrain from keyword stuffing (more on this below)
- All characters must be in lowercase.
- There are no white spaces.
- Words that should be separated by “-“
Landing page URLs should be short and quick to recognize so that they make sense whenever posted on social networking sites or forums.
Read More:The Ultimate Guide to Long Tail Keyword Research in 2023
Create https landing pages.
It is critical to have an SSL certificate tied to your landing pages and websites in general.
Because Google uses https in its ranking algorithm, it will provide you with a minor comparative ranking bump.
Furthermore, it communicates to consumers that they may trust your website when providing personal information and completing a transaction.
Read more:Internal Linking for SEO: Why and How?
Choose whatever keywords you wish to rank for.
To be able to SEO-optimize any page, you must first determine the keywords you would like the page to rank for.
Whenever it pertains to landing page SEO, the process becomes a little more difficult because SEO keywords must be consistent with the landing page content.
The easiest method to do this is to:
First, write your landing page content without thinking about keywords.
Determine the keywords you wish your landing page to appear for in the search engines.
The keywords should then be strategically placed on your website as a component of the on-page SEO procedure.
Optimize for On-Page SEO
Once you’ve determined which keywords you want your website to rank for, the following step is to incorporate those keywords within your page.
This is known as on-page SEO, and the actions to take are as follows:
Add the main keyword in the URL
Recheck your page URL to ensure it includes your primary target keyword.
For example, if you want to sell Seo services, your URL must be https://www.vh-info.com /SEO-packages.
Add keywords in your title tag
- Each page published on the internet has a title tag (title>/title).This is not always what appears on the page (that is the H1 tag), but rather what appears in the browser and search engine results on pages.Include your core keyword or related variants in the title tag.
Add Keywords in your meta descriptions
The website meta description also isn’t displayed on the page itself, but it may appear in search results after your title.
When it comes to SEO, it is critical to add relevant keywords in your description and keep them attractive so that consumers will click on your snippets and browse your website.
Google does not always display the meta description content that you supply, but it does occasionally generate a unique description based on the page’s content.
However, you should always optimize the meta description tag on every one of your sites.
Add keywords or close variations on your main heading (H1 tag) and subheadings
The H1 tag is the page’s initial element.
The H1 tag is usually similar to the page title, which is fine. You can utilize alternative keywords in your H1 tag to improve optimization.
A decent landing page is divided into sections, each of which should include an H2 heading and subheadings with an H3 header.
Always attempt to utilize a hierarchical system when designing any page. On top of the structure, you have your H1 (just one per page), then many H2s, and finally H3s.
Optimize for Content SEO
Another aspect that requires optimization is the page’s content. We’ve optimized the title, description, and headings so far, but we still need to optimize the rest of the text.
Make sure the page has text content.
To begin, your landing page must include text content in addition to photos or videos. This is quite crucial.
Text information is easier for search engines to interpret than photos or videos.
Depending on the page’s design, you can utilize intelligent methods to add the text material required for SEO without damaging the design.
Follow these simple guidelines:
Add a few lines of text material to the beginning of the page. This can be placed beneath your primary title.
The goal is to provide both search engines and visitors with a good sense of what the page is about.
Add additional text information under your primary offering. The main offering is usually displayed above the top of a landing page so that consumers can notice it as soon as they arrive on the page.
This is fine; you don’t have to change your design to include additional content above the fold, but you can do so later on.
Add LSI Keywords to your content
LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Index) are phrases with the very same meanings as your target keywords.
Rather than reiterating similar keywords in your content and risking having a keyword-stuffed copy, look for and enhance your material with LSI keywords.
The LSI Graph can help you locate similar keywords to include in your text.
Read More:The Ultimate Guide to Long Tail Keyword Research in 2023
Optimize Images and Videos
Landing pages typically include a lot of visuals, such as photographs or videos.
In regards to SEO, make certain that these items are placed on the page in an SEO-friendly format.
Image SEO
All images must have three elements optimized:
Filename – It’s not the most important SEO indicator, but using filenames that make sense is a good idea. For instance, if an image depicts a blue widget, the filename can only be blue-widget.jpg.
ALT Text – This is the most crucial aspect of image SEO.
You must have a relevant ALT Text for each image. When images are disabled, the ALT Text is displayed in the browser and is utilized by search engines to determine what an image is about.
Try to add keywords to your ALT text in a natural manner.
Image Captions – You may also add a caption to each image. This is the brief explanation that appears after the image. The caption could be similar to the ALT text, but with more information.
Video SEO
If your landing page includes videos, ensure that:
Videos are delivered via a third-party service such as YouTube or Vimeo. Videos are typically many megabytes in size, and using a streaming platform is far superior to downloading the videos from your system.
Add video schema to every video to provide search engine bots with more information about your video. A JSON-LD script, as explained here, can be used.
Add structured data markup
Structured data markup is accessible for more than just videos. Depending on what product or business you are selling, you can utilize a variety of schemas on your landing page.
Schemas can assist your page to rank higher by improving the display of your search snippet.
Schemas allow you to provide additional information to search engines about what you’re offering, the amount it costs, stock availability, and a variety of other important information.
Optimize for Mobile
Your landing page will almost certainly be visited so much more on mobile devices than on desktop computers. For various reasons, you will be required to ensure that it is suited for mobile devices.
With the launch of Google’s mobile 1st index, it has become more crucial than ever to have SEO-friendly landing pages.
To mobile-optimize, your landing pages, ensure that:
- There is no horizontal scrolling on mobile pages.
- They contain the entire content of the desktop page.
- They load quickly.
- They don’t have popups or other distracting items for mobile users.
- They look good at various resolutions.
Optimize for Speed
A page’s loading time is a well-known SEO ranking criterion. Pages that load quickly tend to rank better than slower pages.
Speed is even more critical for landing pages, as different studies have proven that it has an effect on sales and conversions.
To reap the advantages of both SEO and increased sales, your landing pages must load as quickly as feasible.
Here are some pointers to consider:
- To optimize ALL of your photographs, use image compression software. Tools like TinyImage optimizing can greatly decrease image size without compromising quality.
- CSS and JS should be minified.
- Make use of a caching plugin.
- Make use of a CDN.
- Use an SEO web hosting provider rather than shared hosting to host your website and landing pages. When it comes to hosting, consider acquiring a web server in Asia to provide more security and efficiency.
- Never embed videos on your website; instead, use a streaming provider such as YouTube or video.
Add internal links pointing to your landing page
We’ve optimized the content and structure of a landing page so far; now it’s time to consider how you’ll best promote your pages and boost their ranks.
We shall investigate three areas:
- Internal hyperlinks
- 301 Redirections Backlinks
- An internal link is one that points to a page within the same domain.
You can use inbound links to help Google understand the significance of your landing pages when working on SEO.
Pages with the highest number of internal links are regarded as the most valuable pages on a website, and this might help your SEO.
Conclusion
As a business owner or marketer, you can maximize the potential of your landing pages for SEO through multiple methods. Starting with keyword research, your content must be accurate to have effective outcomes on user experience as well as optimization. Make sure that you use header tags for headings and subheadings, optimize images for better search engine visibility, and any internal links should use relevant keywords in its anchor text. It is also important that no matter the platform you are using, whether it be WordPress, Squarespace, or Wix, ensure that the page is properly structured (Google loves proper structuring). Analyze your efforts and adjust accordingly because it is all about trial and error. With these tips in mind, you will be able to create landing pages with maximum optimization potential and set yourself one step further above your competitors’ sites.
Writer Information
Hitesh Sanandiya is a Co-founder & CEO at vh-info. He loves to talk about link building, seo & digital marketing strategies. In his free time, He likes to read & stay updated on the latest digital marketing trends!