What Is An SEO Landing Page?

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When you hear the term “landing page,” you tend to think of web pages designed for an advertising campaign — PPC, remarketing, etc. However, a landing page for SEO is also a very important tool for certain types of SEO campaigns.

The purpose of a landing page for SEO is to attract organic search engine traffic for a specific set of keywords. Once visitors land on the SEO landing page, they will see content that is ultra-relevant to their search query. The page may be designed to be a conversion page, or it may be designed to create high interest and then convert through links to the appropriate product/service page(s) on the main website.

An SEO landing page may or may not appear in the website’s navigation. 

Example of a Landing Page for SEO 

Suppose your company sells widgets throughout the U.S. Your website ranks well for strategic keywords such as “widgets” and “blue widget.” But to increase your overall visibility on Google, you want to attract local traffic as well as niche traffic, without overloading your site’s navigation. Your strategy, then, is to create a series of SEO landing pages to be optimized around keywords including: 

  • Widgets in Chicago
  • Widgets in Denver
  • Widgets in San Francisco
  • Black and blue widgets
  • Red and green widgets
  • Black and blue widgets in Chicago
  • Red and green widgets in Chicago
  • Black and blue widgets in Denver
  • Red and green widgets in Denver
  • Black and blue widgets in San Francisco
  • Red and green widgets in San Francisco
  • Blue widgets on sale
  • Blue widgets with lifetime warranties

You get the idea. SEO landing pages following this strategy could encompass scores or even hundreds of pages, all designed and optimized to capture local or niche traffic.

How to Design a Landing Page for SEO

An effective SEO landing page must do much more than simply incorporate the targeted keywords in the right manner:

  • First of all, each landing page must have unique content — 75 to 80 percent unique, in fact. This is a real challenge if you want a series of landing pages such as “widgets in [location]” for, say, 50 locations. If the pages are mere duplicates of each other, with minimal alterations, Google will probably ignore them. Professional SEO copywriters are adept at executing this type of assignment.
  • Landing pages must be engaging, informative and persuasive. The purpose of a landing page, SEO variety, is not to simply attract website visitors; the idea is to get them to convert, either directly on the landing page or by motivating them to click to your standard product/service page. Thus, effective SEO landing pages require the hand of a talented consumer or industrial copywriter.
  • If appropriate to the selling situation, creating long form SEO landing pages could be a highly effective strategy. Long form content — word counts of 1,500 and more — tend to get noticed by Google crawlers and rank very well, all other things being equal. For complex products/services and unfamiliar value propositions, long form, educational content makes perfect sense. If, on the other hand, you believe extensive content will impede conversions, go for conversions.
  • Naturally, SEO landing pages must be optimized in all normal respects, including properly constructed title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, etc.

All SEO Target Website Pages Should Have a Landing Page Philosophy

Even if you do not require special landing pages for SEO as described here, designing your website’s target pages — home page, product pages, service pages — from a landing page point of view can only help you.

Often, companies fumble SEO campaigns despite getting great rankings and traffic because their product pages don’t do an effective job of selling. The same can be said, unfortunately, for a good number of home pages. 

If you view your home page and product/service pages as your most valuable sales representative, then you will be much more likely to format these pages persuasively:

  • Lay out the value proposition quickly and forcefully.
  • Provide facts to back up your assertions.
  • Write from the prospect’s point of view.
  • Push details down the page — readers interested in getting the whole story won’t mind scrolling.
  • Use subheads liberally and keep sentences short, to maximize scannability.
  • Include credibility statements to give prospects confidence you will do what you claim.
  • Provide photos, images and other graphic elements to add interest and clarity.
  • Ask for the action you want the prospect to take.

Learn More

10 Ways to Make Your Lead Generation Website Convert on the First Visit

The Conversion Funnel: Essential Baseline Tactics for Accelerated ROI

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