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One of the most important elements of your digital marketing strategy is the landing page your visitors will see when they arrive. Your choice should be based on the goal you want to achieve from your marketing efforts, which could be a lead, a video play, a new subscription, or anything else that could benefit you and the visitor.
Once you have defined your goals, you need to make sure the landing page components are SEO friendly and can help the page perform well in the SERPs.
Who is my target? What keywords am I using? What is my current position on the SERPs?
Once you can answer these questions, you will be able to determine what pages you want to focus your optimization efforts on, and how you can attract more qualified organic traffic that is interested in your products or services and will therefore ultimately result in more conversions.
Landing Page Components
Every landing page should be designed with your potential clients in mind. Everyone who arrives on these pages should know exactly what they can (and should) do while they’re here, whether it’s a download, a video play, a subscription or just a further step toward making a purchase.
To achieve this goal, you need to consider a couple of things. First, make sure there is consistent branding across pages. This can be as simple as adding the logo in the same place on all your landing pages. This can be commonly found on the top left or right side of your page.
Favicons are as important as having the logo visible on the website. This will help keep the logo visible to the user.
Second, your landing page needs to limit navigation and avoid secondary links that might lead the user away from your end goal. This means you will need to avoid using menu tabs or outside elements like social connections or awards.
Keyword Selection
The power of keyword research lies in better understanding your target market and how they are searching for your content, services, or products.
You can start creating your master keyword research document by considering all of your service and product offerings.
There are dozens of paid and free tools that you can use for keyword research – or you can even mix and match your favorites.
While some people may think you need paid tools (SEMrush or Moz) to complete the research process, you actually can come up with quite a robust list of keywords using free research tools (Google Keyword Planner).
Keyword Driven Content
The first step to build a keyword-driven, SEO-friendly content strategy is to identify the keywords and phrases that matter most to your specific business.
These keywords should drive the focus of your content. We’re not talking about filling every page with a hundred instances of the word, but a content structure that is built on this foundation.
Content Structure
In an effective SEO strategy, your keywords and the content structure on your site need to work together.
If your keyword research has been done right, you’ll have thought about common, competitive keywords as well as some of the long-tail niche search terms. This should be reflected in your site structure.
Pages that focus on more common search terms should appear high in your site structure, while pages optimized for more long-tail keywords should appear lower down.
These long-tail pages at the bottom of the pyramid must link correctly to the pages higher in the pyramid.
Steps to creating site structure
- Plan out a hierarchy before you develop your website
- Create a URL structure that follows your navigation hierarchy.
- Create your site navigation in HTML or CSS.
- Develop a comprehensive internal linking structure with the website section.
URL Structure
A site’s URL structure should be as simple as possible. Consider organizing your content so that URLs are constructed logically and in a manner that is most intelligible to humans (when possible, readable words rather than long ID numbers).
Optimal Format: https://www.example.com/category-keyword/subcategory-keyword/primary-keyword.html
Page Speed
Page speed can be described in either “page load time” (the time it takes to fully display the content on a specific page) or “time to first byte” (how long it takes for your browser to receive the first byte of information from the web server).
You can evaluate your landing page’s speed with Google’s PageSpeed Insights. PageSpeed Insights Speed Score incorporates data from CrUX (Chrome User Experience Report) and reports on two important speed metrics: First Contentful Paint (FCP) and DOMContentLoaded (DCL).
SEO Best Practices
- Enable compression
- Minimize CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
- Reduce redirects
- Remove render-blocking JavaScript
- Improve server response time
- Optimize images
Conclusion
A website is a critical component of a digital marketing strategy, but not all websites use landing pages as effectively as they could. This means they are potentially missing out on a lot of conversion opportunities.
Make sure that you are following these best practices and simple strategies to create the most SEO-friendly landing pages and get the most value out of your online marketing efforts.
