Marketers have always been told to keep the words to a minimum in order to bring attention to the right buttons in a landing page’s context. To some extent this is true; however, landing pages that are focused on the action buttons fail to rank in the search engines. This means zero organic traffic!
An SEO-focused landing page has different creation criteria because it requires more focus on high-quality content which is exactly the opposite of how you have been doing your landing pages. Before we move on, keep in mind that more content does not necessarily mean more distraction, especially not in the instances where you want your landing pages to rank on Google, i.e. SEO-focused landing pages.
When Landing Pages Fail?
Landing pages created with a sole focus on conversion will always fail to rank. To bring attention to the right action buttons, marketers often stick with power words and short sentences. If this does not bring the desired results, they turn their attention towards keywords. Now, the problem with keywords is that they are overused and in this tough market, the giant players often take the cake when it comes to ranking for a specific keyword.
If you are intent on creating landing pages by implementing the two strategies mentioned above, the odds will never be in your favor. Although you may get a few leads; however, what is in a few leads when you can get tons of organic leads by playing your cards right.
SEO-Focused Landing Pages: Getting Them Right
There is a fine line between under-doing and overdoing something. Where too many strategies’ implementation may get you penalized, the lack of proper strategies in place may also fail to hit it right. If you look at it, there is not any win-win situation going on; unless you use all your resources at the right place and at the right time.
Every marketer knows the secret to securing a great ranking position. To get a good place in the SERPs, individuals need to create engaging content that benefits the readers. The same technique applies to an SEO-optimized landing page.
The secret to a great SEO landing page lies in the incorporation of the right amount of targeted keywords, inbound links to reduce bounce rate, and a lengthy word count to keep the readers interested. Greatly enough, all of these strategies are ranking factors which Google considers before ranking a page.
Now that you have realized that the SEO landing pages are important for increasing the flow of online web traffic, getting them right should be your next strategy. Generally, creating an optimized landing page is not a difficult task because it all comes down to finding and applying the right strategies. Here are some of the ways through which you can achieve a perfect landing page campaign!
- Keywords
The strategy of keywords stops working when you start abusing it. The high amount of keywords may produce short-term results; however, it does so at the expense of quality content. So, instead of riddling your content with keywords, find a middle ground and incorporate them only when necessary.
But before you can start integrating them, you still have to find a list of suitable keywords. Thorough keyword research can be a lengthy process, but it will serve you greatly. Additionally, you can use Google Keyword Planner to find all the high-ranking keywords or you can use external tools like BuzzSumo to spy on your competitors and learn about their keyword strategy.
- Long-Form Content
Google prefers long-form content over short pieces of content. However, that contradicts how marketers are taught to create landing pages. Of course, you can create concise landing pages if the conversion is your main goal. But when it comes to finding a suitable place in the SERPs, you must explore the long-form content options.
Long-form content works because it contains valuable information and is well-researched. Both of these factors attract readers, garners more clicks and results in excessive sharing; all of which signals to Google to improve your rank on the SERPs.
- Links
Incorporating links into your landing page is a wise move since it can decrease bounce rate. Generally, there are three types of links which can be incorporated, i.e. backlinks, outbound links, and internal links.
High-authority backlinks are important since it sends the search engines a strong relevancy signal. However, earning a backlink from a high authority website is not an easy task and you may have to establish yourself as a leading player in a particular niche to successfully earn one from other websites.
Outbound links are necessary for helping Google determine the nature of your content and thus ranking you appropriately. The same goes for internal linking strategy since it guides the readers to the right page which extends their stay on your domain, thus helping your landing page rank better.
- Multimedia
Multimedia elements make content more engaging and fun to read. So, diagrams, infographics, images, gifs, and video tutorials can help you in increasing the time users spend on your landing page. Further, apart from the usual benefit of high user engagement, you can also use multimedia to integrate your target keywords. For instance, you can introduce keywords in the alt attributes of your images or in the transcript of your videos.
Track Your Performance
Making an SEO-focused landing page is a job half done since you also need to track the performance of each factor to know which ones are working and which ones are failing. Generally, 12% conversion is considered to be an acceptable conversion rate so if yours is barely meeting the monthly criteria, you should tweak a few elements to improve results. Also, do not be afraid to get rid of the SEO elements if they are not helping you in your conversion process.
All in all, ranking an SEO-focused landing page is a task that never ends. This is because Google keeps tweaking its algorithms which invalidates previously working factors and makes room for new ranking elements. So, you can never truly relax in a constantly changing environment.
The best strategy to deal with this is to stay at the top of your knowledge game and keep incorporating SEO elements that help you achieve a balance between conversion and ranking in the long run. Remember, your key goal is not to rank only by relying on cheap SEO tricks. Instead, it is to increase the conversion rate by relying on useful yet relevant methods.
Getting everything right can be difficult so, you can take help from affordable SEO services to generate desired results; only if all else fails to work!
