How to Optimize Landing Pages for Higher Conversions & Greater SEO Performance

By now most small business owners know that landing pages are a great place to use a call to action (CTA) to help get people to sign up for email newsletters, buy products, leave a review, or whatever your company wants to make happen. Most people find their way to landing pages by clicking on an ad or through an organic search, and the webpages they land on (hence the name) are there to help track information and build leads for companies. The one thing companies forget, however, is that landing pages don’t have to be all about what happens when someone lands there or how to get people to land there—they can still help your SEO efforts.

Tips to Optimizing Landing Pages for Better SEO

In general, landing pages remove all the clutter and get down to business – a highly targeted approach. The great thing is that you can have as many different landing pages as you want to help prompt different actions, reach a different crowd/demographic, or push specific products. Regardless of what the landing page is asking visitors to do, it’s important that they are optimized to help improve your SEO performance. This will help give your website more authority, improve in rankings, and of course get more eyes on your landing pages and hopefully spiral into more conversions.

A few tips to optimizing your landing pages for SEO:

Make sure you know your goals and basic information about your audience

So this isn’t exactly a tip, but it’s an important first step. When you get started on building landing pages for your company, you have to first ensure you have all the information you need. Who is your target audience – the demographics, their likes and dislikes, spending power? What is the goal of the landing page? Do you want visitors to come to the landing page and buy something immediately, or simply fill out a form and leave their information so it is at your company’s disposal for future products and services? Landing pages will wind up completely different if they’re trying to land a lead or if they’re trying to sell something.

If you try to force more than one idea or goal into one landing page, optimization is going to be tough. The beauty of the whole process is you can have unlimited landing pages, so don’t confuse things. Keep it as simple as possible and you’ll have a better chance at achieving your goal from each landing page.

Focus on your headlines

You need to focus a lot on optimized, relatable headlines that target the demographic/ audience you’re seeking with each page. Think of it like a headline of an article. If you’re browsing your favorite news outlet online, is there anything more influential on your decision to click than a headline? It’s also important, of course, that you don’t mislead the consumer with your headline/tagline. Ensure the content is of relevance to the visitor and syncs up with the headline.

Once you have considered your readers, in terms of SEO you should always make sure that your headlines are including your target keywords. Many companies will simply include the name of their product or service on a landing page and assume that is the best form of optimization, but search is now changing. You need to think like your audience and include keywords in your headline that may appear in their queries. Do keyword research just as you would for a blog post to help you create an optimized headline. Below is a great example from Instapage:

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Use how visitors got to your landing page to your advantage

You should focus on how the visitors got to your landing page in the first place. You’d be better off creating different landing pages for each outlet. Don’t create and use the same landing page for Twitter, Facebook, etc. Consider what you’re putting out there and what those people may be thinking. Each network caters to a different user profile; what works for the Facebook crowd may be unappealing to those from Twitter. Tailor your landing page campaigns specifically to the various audiences you’ll be attracting.

Keep away the clutter

One of the great parts about landing pages is removing the clutter and taking your consumer down a desired and very specific pathway. Think of it like a digital hallway of sorts. Don’t even bother including doors along the way as distractions (like too many hyperlinks, too much information about different campaigns/products, etc.); just keep it one hallway where people enter and lead to the door at the end of the hallway, exactly where you want the visitors to end up. This will help your conversions, but it will help your optimization as well. Too many links or sloppy navigation will get you when it comes to SEO success, so stay simple.

Extra: Use a tool to improve your landing pages

As with most popular tactics in digital marketing, there are some great tools out there to help your company create landing pages, such as GetResponse, which has powerful integrations for email marketing and tools geared towards A/B testing your campaigns and optimizing content. This will help you build your page and maximize leads in a simple and effective way. Tools like this help give you a boost with built-in web forms, different formats and hundreds of different styles, templates and images to help get you started and on the right path without wasting valuable resources like time or money. Below is a screenshot from GetResponse that shows a few options:

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The Takeaway

In the end, optimizing your landing pages really can make all the difference in a company’s overall success. According to ion interactive, Genworth increased its lead volume 3,000 percent and reported a 350 percent increase in digitally driven revenue by employing a landing page program that was well suited for their needs.

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Marketing Sherpa also saw success with 64% of marketers admitting that landing pages are the most effective way to test value proposition.

Do you have any advice for optimizing your landing pages for a greater SEO performance? Let us know your story and your thoughts in the comment section below.

Guest author: 

Robyn-Dale Samuda is the VP of Marketing & Content Strategist at InboundJunction, a content marketing company based in Israel. We make internet marketing a “no-brainer” for businesses by managing the content marketing process and help clients achieve positive, measurable returns on branding, PR and search presence. ( Twitter: https://twitter.com/robynsamuda )