Tips for Creating SEO-Friendly Landing Pages That Rank

One of the most powerful digital marketing tools of 2020 is the landing page. The entire purpose of a landing page is to generate leads that will hopefully convert into profits later on, but there’s no chance of that happening if it’s not getting any traffic.

In other words, it won’t have the effect you’re hoping for if nobody is seeing it.

We all know about search engine optimisation for attracting organic traffic to a website. Well, the exact same approaches and techniques that are used for boosting traffic to your website can be used to attract your target audience to a landing page.

It won’t be easy, but following these tips to creating an SEO-friendly landing page will help to rank your page and boost traffic.

Why Your Landing Page Isn’t Ranking?

Using targeted, SEO-friendly keywords throughout your landing page doesn’t guarantee a high ranking on search engines. There’s a lot of competition out there, and chances are that the main competitors of your industry are already ranking for those same words and phrases.

Your page might also be suffering from some technical issues, which is basically a guarantee that it won’t show up in search results.

Conversion-Focused vs Optimisation-Focused Pages

There’s a major difference between conversion-focused pages (ones that are solely meant to convert and generate leads) and SEO-focused pages (ones that are meant to rank). In an ideal world, you’d be able to create a page that is capable of both converting and ranking, but it doesn’t always work like that.

Landing pages that rank tend to contain way more content than minimal conversion-focused ones. In addition to a lengthier word count, SEO-friendly pages often have a healthier keyword density, better loading times, and more outbound links.

How to Create Your SEO-Friendly Landing Page

Creating landing pages that have been properly SEO-ed takes a lot of work, especially considering the fact that Google is always evolving and optimisation is way more technical than it used to be. To get started, here’s what you should be focusing on:

• Keywords
• Page Speed
• Quality (Shareable) Content
• Backlinking

Focus on Keyword Analysis

Every optimisation strategy involves keywords, and ranking your landing page is no exception. Keyword research is the first step, and even though this process can be long and tedious, it can also make a huge difference in your ranking results.

Once you’ve put in the research (or you’ve invested in a keyword analysis tool), now it’s time to strategically place these keywords throughout the page. Try to avoid keyword stuffing; if you can’t include all of them, no worries. Google penalizes for the unnatural “stuffing” of keywords.

Don’t Underestimate the Power of Speed

Page speed is a major player in SEO, mainly because the average internet user is impatient and doesn’t want to wait around for a page to load. Slow page speed will likely result in people leaving your page after a few seconds, and this will reflect poorly to Google.

You can use the PageSpeed Insights tool from Google to determine how fast your page is. If it’s not up to par, try using smaller image files or making the switch to a faster web host.

Include Quality Content That’s Shareable

The traditional landing page is meant to be extremely minimal, basically just with a headline, a few bullet points, and a Call to Action. This isn’t the case with SEO-friendly pages, and you can pretty much make them as long as you need to.

This is because search engines favour long-form content over short, minimal pages. One of the main characteristics of a great landing page is simplicity, but forget about this for SEO purposes. Just try not to obsess too much over page length.

Invest in Backlinks to Your Landing Page

When a search engine sees that someone likes your page enough to link to it, it essentially shows that you’re being vouched for by outside sources. Do your best to promote the link on other sites – chances are Google will reward you with a higher ranking.

Your non-ranking landing pages aren’t doing you any favors, so it’s time to start optimising. Still have questions? Get in touch to learn about SGD’s tried and tested SEO packages for better search engine results.