So you want to drive traffic to your landing pages? Well, everyone does. There are several ways to achieve this including strategies like PPC, email marketing, and several others. However, what if you could use a free tactic implemented by the majority of marketing specialists today?
Sounds too good to be true? Fortunately, it’s not. Meet SEO, the number one way to drive organic traffic to your landing pages. This one technique will help you get a stream of visitors incoming from search engines.
Most people think that ranking above competitors is too hard. The truth is it can be if you don’t know what you are doing. In this article, we look at several steps you can take to ensure that your landing pages receive as much traffic as possible. These steps will help you dramatically increase your chances of receiving tons of visitors to your landing pages.
And, even better, everything is transparent, and there are no black hat tactics employed. Give our tips a shot and see how you can easily optimize your landing pages for SEO. But before we dive into that, let’s take a look at what a landing page is.
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What’s the Meaning of “Landing Page”?
Before we get excited about receiving lots of search traffic, you first need to understand what a landing page is. There are several descriptions or definitions of what a landing page is, but the basics are the same. A landing page is a web page on a website that serves the purpose of attracting visitors.
People on social media or those using search engines to look for goods and services will end up on your landing page and be presented with the opportunity to purchase or engage. So, in short, the main focus of a landing page is to convert. Usually, these pages cannot be accessed via the main navigation. This is because they serve a specific function, and they may not be relevant to everyone who visits the website.
For instance, you might create a landing page for people searching for books similar to the one you have written. This book could serve as an incentive that channels people towards subscribing to a newsletter. So, at the end of the day, this book will funnel your traffic to a form located on the landing page and help you to secure several conversions.
There are several advantages to using landing pages. The main advantage is that they are quite effective at helping you increase your bottom-line revenue. However, for this to happen, you need to know how to optimize your landing pages for SEO.
Once your landing pages are optimized for SEO, it will be easier to gain more conversions. Please note that there are different types of conversions, and the one you seek is entirely up to you. For instance, a conversion could be tied to a means of acquiring revenue, like selling a service or a product to people in Tampa FL. On the other hand, a conversion can also be linked to an indirect way of acquiring revenue, like subscribing to a newsletter. No matter what type of conversion you seek, the end goal is to get people who visit your landing page to interact with it on some level and this will lead to an overall increase in revenue.
Revenue and Conversions
The reason why people are interested in optimizing landing pages for SEO is to gain more conversions. Landing pages can achieve this through several methods. This is why it’s essential to ensure that you have a landing page for each campaign that you run.
One of the most significant advantages of operating using a landing page is that you can customize your strategies. For instance, it’s possible to create different landing pages and place them on your website simultaneously. This can be done for all your inbound and outbound marketing strategies. Here are some of the ways landing pages can help you secure more revenue and conversions.
Improved Audience Targeting
A properly designed landing page will give you an enhanced ability to target your audience. For instance, if you have two separate demographic segments and you want to appeal to young couples and single adults in Tampa FL, you will likely take two different approaches when it comes to how you market to them. If you try to have both audiences on the same landing page, you will end up speaking to them generically. By splitting landing pages, you can increase your relevance and boost your overall engagement. So, in essence, landing pages help you properly segment your audience according to certain demographic parameters.
Analytics are Easier With Landing Pages
When using landing pages, it will be easier to get clear data from your audience. There are a number of reasons why this is so. First, by creating a landing page for each campaign, you will be essentially isolating your target demographic’s behavior to a single page. This is better than trying to track the complex paths followed by your audience as they interact with your entire website to convert. The process of using a landing page narrows things down to yes or no. Apart from that, if you have several landing pages on your website running at the same time, it becomes easiest to compare your data.
Finally, with a landing page, it’s easier to track your performance over a prolonged period of time. This is quite important as you can use this information to make adjustments to your marketing pages.
You need to keep in mind that for you to reap all the benefits of using a landing page, you must ensure that it’s properly optimized. Apart from that, you must also be actively tracking and measuring data from the landing page. One simple way to do this is to use the Google analytics tool. This tool will give you all the necessary information you need. However, for some people, these tools can be a bit too technical, and using them is time-consuming. If you want to focus on other areas of your business, you can leave such tasks to a dedicated team of professionals like Velvet Ink Media.
How You Can Optimize Your Landing Pages for SEO
There are several techniques that can be used to optimize landing pages for SEO.
Attractive Design
The visual appeal of your landing page must be top-notch. This means you must also put a lot of thought into the layout. There is a basic layout that you can start with and several guidelines you might want to consider. For instance, you must have your forms featured prominently, and your logo and headlines have to be visible. Apart from that, you must also ensure that your body copy, images, and videos are stacked against each other. Once you use these guidelines to create a basic layout, you should go ahead and customize your approach. The trick is to ensure that your landing page looks unique.
User Friendliness
User-friendliness is a huge component of SEO. You must ensure that your users don’t have to go through unnecessary hoops as they try to perform actions or look for information on your landing pages. If your landing page is difficult to navigate, visitors will quickly leave, and that’s bad for your SEO.
People don’t like scrolling on a website unnecessarily. This means you must ensure that all of the most important details, forms, and buttons are featured above the fold. If you try and force users to scroll, they will end up abandoning your website before you can effectively convince them to take action your want. So, if you don’t want to lose deals, limit the amount of material you place below the fold. The only material that goes there should be material that not everyone is going to need.
Apart from keeping material above the fold, it’s important to also reduce the required fields on your forms. This is very important. Users don’t want to spend a lot of time entering information and completing tasks on your website. To avoid this, keep your forms short and straight to the point. They should only be limited to a few necessary fields. For instance, if you want to use a landing page to gain subscribers, the form that you place on the page must only ask for the name and email address.
Lastly, you must also make sure that your conversion process has a few simple steps. If people have to go through too many steps before they check out, they may abandon the whole thing and leave before completing the action you want them to complete. It’s advisable to hire a team of professionals like Velvet Ink Media to assess your landing pages and ensure that they are user-friendly.
Know Your Keywords
This should be the first step when optimizing landing pages for SEO. Before you start performing any actions on your landing page, you need to know the keywords that you want to target. A keyword can be a single word like marketing or a short phrase like Tampa FL SEO services. You need to take some time to think and also use several tools available on the internet to find out the best keywords to describe your landing page. Ideally, you must have a list of all the keywords that you want your landing page to rank for. This process involves a significant amount of research.
Once you have come up with a list of possible keywords, you must put those keywords into a search engine. Check out the results that come first and find out if there are any websites that offer the same services or goods as you. Take a look at the keywords on those websites and put them on your list as well. If there are no pages that are similar to yours, chances are you will be having the wrong set of keywords. In such instances, it would be best to rethink your keywords. This essentially means that people will be having a different view of the meaning of your keyword. You must also check for any relevant suggestions linked to your keyword on the search engine. It’s advisable to add these to the list as well.
Once you are done with the search engine step, you must find a keyword research tool to use. There are several of these available, and you should feed your keyword list to the tool. There are several suggestions and insights that you will get by using such tools. For instance, you will be able to see how many people search for that keyword daily or monthly, a metric known as search volume. You should then save your keywords along with the search volumes in descending order.
The last step is choosing the main keyword. This is the keyword that best reflects the purpose of your landing page. The main keyword should be the center of your optimization. After choosing the main keyword, you must also choose about five other keywords from the list. Ideally, those that have the most search volumes. Please note that keyword research is a time-consuming process. If you are in Tampa FL, you can get experts like Velvet Ink Media to help with this process. Once you have these keywords, the next steps will not be as time-consuming.
Choose a Good Title Tag to Make Lasting Impressions
When search engines crawl your site and find the title tag of your landing page, it will be like shaking hands for the first time. So, you must use the title tag to make a good first impression on the search engine, the same way you would want to make a good first impression on someone reading your web page. With your title tag, you will only have no more than 70 characters to make a good first impression. It’s advisable to put your main keyword in the title tag. This will help search engines understand the subject of your landing page. If you don’t have many other things to write, you could include other keywords as well.
Know-How to Use Your Meta Description
Your meta description is like a signboard for search engine result pages. This piece of writing is displayed right below the website title and URL. You must take the time to come up with a good meta description if you don’t want search engines to display whatever they want. Also, crafting a good meta description will help you better communicate with potential visitors on search engine result pages.
When writing a meta description, don’t complicate things. All you need to do is state the landing subject and incorporate the main keyword. It is also advisable to throw in a call to action. This way, the user will be enticed to view your landing page, and they will most likely take the desired action. Also, when you are writing a meta description, you must keep in mind that you are writing it for people. Most businesses hire experts with copywriting skills like Velvet Ink Media to craft their meta descriptions for them. You can also do the same if you want to create descriptions that will catch the attention of your audience.
Spruce Up Your URL
Tuning up your URL is an important step when optimizing your landing page for SEO. This will make your landing pages more attractive. For instance, you must consider adding a keyword to your landing page URL. Research shows that URLs that contain keywords are more alluring for search engines. So, if possible, you must put your main keyword in the website URL. However, as you are doing this, you must ensure that your URL doesn’t end up being too long. URLs that are too long and spammy will not do good for your user experience.
Draft a Proper Headline
Headlines are an integral part of your SEO strategy. A properly chosen headline screams “read me” and catches the eye. A great headline will attract both the users and the search engine. So, it is important to put your keyword in the headline. However, you must ensure that the headline still sounds natural. If you attempt to make something and it doesn’t work out, don’t hesitate to reword it until it’s no longer ugly and unappealing.
Include Properly Crafted Words on the Landing Pages
Search engine crawlers love words. Even though they don’t really understand the meaning of words, bots still love to read. Their main purpose is to understand the concepts behind the text. These words essentially tell the search engine the best and most relevant website for a particular search term.
When writing copy for your landing page, your key focus should be on convincing users to take the desired action. Apart from this, you must also ensure that your copy is enriched with keywords. You can switch them up a little bit to make sure they sound natural within the text. It’s also possible to tear phrases into single words and throw them around the text. There are also words known as keyword synonyms that you can use. These words will give bots a hint about the topic of your landing page. For instance, you can use location-based keywords like Tampa FL to tell a search engine where you business is location.
Remember that Bots Can’t Actually See
With advances in technology, there has been some work that’s been done to try and get search engines to recognize images. However, at the moment, it’s best to assume that they are as good as moles. Instead of viewing images, search engines use search workarounds to see the kinds of pictures that will be on a website. One method used by search engines is to view the alt attribute of the img HTML tag.
The alt tag is like a short description of the picture that you would have inserted on your landing page. Without such attributes, it will be difficult for search engines to understand what’s happening on your website. All this can be a bit confusing for you if you just want to run your business, that’s why you must hire SEO professionals like Velvet Ink Media.
Additional Reading
