7 Tips to Optimize Your Landing Page for Search Engines

Do you want to optimize your landing pages? If you have never heard of a “landing page” before, you are likely a newbie in online marketing.

At times there is confusion between a landing page content and other web pages. To distinguish between these web pages more clearly, you need to understand the differences between organic traffic and paid search traffic.

As far as digital marketing is concerned, a landing page form is a single web page designed solely to perform a marketing campaign.

A landing page is where the visitor lands once they click on a directory such as Google AdWords on search result pages or similar pages.

The makeup or design of a landing page SEO is quite simple. This puts landing pages in the best position to push up the conversion rate for Google AdWord campaigns.

There are seven types of landing pages you can utilize on your site. Each one comes with benefits for your website.

Types of Landing Pages

404 landing pages

These are the pages people see when they come across a page on your site that no longer exists. These pages can be frustrating for consumers, but they also give you a chance to have fun and show your brand’s personality.

Microsites

Microsites are subsets to your original site, like a little mini website (hence the name). These are good for different online marketing campaigns you want to broadcast. They come with their own URLs, which make sharing them and the campaign they’re marketing pretty easy to share. Think of movie trailer sites as an example.

Unsubscribe page

This landing page is the dreaded page that allows customers to unsubscribe. This doesn’t have to be the spooky ghost in your site’s closet, as you can use this page as an opportunity. With this landing page, you can remind your customers of all the good they’ve gotten out of your business and allow them to manage preferences and look over your site again.

Viral landing page

Viral landing pages are a helpful tool to bring in more people than your target audience. Created to broadcast your brand, this page brings in potential customers.

Lead Capture Landing page

This landing page is more on the technical side. Unlike other landing pages designed to capture leads and direct current customers, the lead capture page is where visitor data is asked for. You know when you sign up with LeadAdvisors, and you’re prompted to give your name and email? That’s a landing page. (this is big)

Long-form sales landing page

This page is a little different than the rest because of how long it can be. On the sales landing page, you answer your target audience’s questions and give any information that could make their journey from a potential lead to a buying customer a smooth transition.

Click-through landing page

The most basic out of the lot, the click-through page, gives visitors all the info they need about your product or service. This is predominately used for the beginning of the sales conversion funnel.

Don’t know what the funnel is? Let’s work on that.

The Sales Conversion Funnel

To fully grasp how important landing pages are, you have to know the process your visitors take from being leads to becoming paying customers. We like to call this journey the sales conversion funnel.

The sales funnel comprises three major parts, each one vital to the success of your business: Awareness, Interest, and Decision/Action. Each one is crucial to getting customers. Landing pages are a great tool used to move your would-be customer along.

Awareness

This is the beginning of the funnel. At this point, you’re trying to catch the eyes of your lead through your content or ad. At this point, you’re trying to throw your net out and catch any visitor you can. Remember the click-through landing page? This would be its time to shine.

Interest

Now you have the visitor’s interest. Great! This is when you begin to inform them of the problem they have and viable solutions. You want to approach the lead as someone with authoritative knowledge of their problem and its solution.

Decision/Action

Now that the visitor has all the facts, you begin to reel them in. Talk about how your product or service is the superior solution to the issue and where they can find it. This is where the visitor makes the ultimate jump to actual customer. At this stage of the funnel, use a call to action (CTA) that will direct the customer on what to do next.

How Can a Landing Page Lead to Successful Sales

The best landing pages are those great at converting visitors to customers who listen to your CTA. Each type of landing page can increase conversions and push viewers along the funnel.

When to Use A Landing Page:

There are different reasons to use a landing page, though they can all be consolidated into three major categories.

When you’re trying to reach a target audience

Dedicated landing pages, also known as targeted landing pages, are great ways to reach your target audience. Most landing page types previously mentioned can be written with a target audience in mind.

Promotion

You can use landing pages to promote many things for your business, from a free ebook or your newsletter to a new product or service.

User Experience

You want to make sure your visitors have a great experience perusing your brand’s site. That includes your landing pages. A great landing page experience can help leads understand your products, learn more about your services, and stay updated on different offers.

Why is My Landing Page Not Converting?

The point of landing pages is to convert visitors. A perfect landing page has a high conversion rate, bringing more people to your brand.

But what happens if the page isn’t doing its job?

This can happen for several reasons, though some are more common than others. If you’re not getting the conversion rates you want, your problem could be one of these issues:

Poor Design

Let’s face it, we all weren’t meant to be web designers. That’s why many people call professionals. Perhaps the design of your landing page is off or counterintuitive. Be sure that your landing page is also usable on mobile devices for users on the go.

Visitors Can’t Identify CTAs

CTAs are the result of your landing page’s efforts in reeling in that visitor. If a visitor can’t figure out what to do next, there’s a big problem.

No Good Headlines

While a landing page is usually kept simple, your headline shouldn’t be. Without a good headline to tell visitors where they are on your site, you lose more conversions than you get.

Landing Pages and Paid Search Traffic

Whenever you hear about landing pages, consider that they are designed for paid search traffic, such as the paid search ad Google Adwords and other related platforms, being the foremost web search engine. This is the direct opposite of organic traffic generated by a programmed algorithm on web browsers. Owners of web space use it to increase conversion.

There are four components on a Google search result page there. They are:

1. Paid search results (Google AdWords)

2. Google featured snippet

3. Organic search results

4. Paid search results (Google shopping ads)

Paid search results such as Google AdWords and Google shopping ads are designed so that the advertisers can dictate to the web browser where the link takes users to. This way, you could decide to direct them to any home page of your choice.
Paying attention to essential landing page elements is vital to its visibility. Now, let us see some aids for optimizing your search engine landing pages.

What is Landing Page Optimization (LPO)?

LPO is essentially improving aspects of on-page elements. A subsection of conversion rate optimization (CRO), it’s used to ensure your landing pages bring you excellent leads. By using landing page optimization tools and analytics, you can have high converting landing pages.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is when you use two versions of a land page and present them to your website visitors to figure out which one makes the most impact.
Optimizing landing pages ensures that your landing pages and your website work well with your sales funnel, bringing a high conversion rate to your site.

Search Engine Optimization

Another key component to landing page design is search engine optimization or SEO. Optimizing landing page elements for SEO ensures that your landing pages are visible to website visitors looking for them. This requires keyword research and using those keywords connected to your user base tracked by web analytics software like Google analytics.

By ensuring your landing pages utilize SEO, more potential customers will see your page, allowing you to establish credibility, and bring in more paying customers.

7 Optimization Tips for a Good Landing Page

1. Be Familiar with Your Keywords

This is the first thing you should do before working on your landing page optimization. Try to figure out which keywords are suitable and applicable to your site. There are tools to help you find the most searched keywords within your site niche effectively.

When we talk about keywords, we mean single words like “advertising” or hyphenated words like “digital marketing.” That is why it is essential to be careful when choosing keywords for your landing page to be specific yet encompassing.

An excellent way to understand how your choice of keywords will work is to put yourself in the searcher’s position. To do this, make a list of keywords you intend to use and run a search on the web browser if the results fall in line or are related to the content of your landing page. Then, you can be sure to be on your path to having an effectively optimized landing page.

2. Make Use of Impressive Title Tags

The search engine makes use of bots. Amongst other things, these bots scan through page title tags you use for your web page. To get a sense of how these tags work, you need to see it as an interviewer and your title tag as a job seeker.

In this case, you will agree that the first impression is critical to your title tags’ success. To this end, ensure that they are punchy and not too long. In fact, make sure you don’t go past 65 characters.

3. Make Use of META Descriptions as an Indicator

If you are not familiar with META description tags, you can think of it as a free signboard for the search engine results page. It is usually found somewhere below the website title and URL.

At times search engines might choose not to display your META. However, it is still best to pay attention to it as a well-written META description, making it a message matching indicator. That way, it will draw users’ attention when search engines decide to reflect on the search result page.

4. Fine-Tune your URL

Take it or leave it. Search engines are sensitive to your URL. When constructing your landing page URL, ensure that it contains at least one relevant keyword. Preferably, make sure you use your primary keyword.

Your URL might look like just an identity for your landing page. However, it might mean much more to your web browser. To this end, never forget to be choosy when picking words for your URL.

While trying to position your page within the search engine, you need to consider the users who might want to use the URL details. While you must use relevant keywords, it is also vital that your URL is not packed with long words. Using a short URL, you will be helping users who want to copy from one device to another, especially when the network is a constraint.

5. Make your Headlines Catchy

If you want an excellent lead capture, such that your landing page will be worthy of the attention of search engines, it is essential to give it a high-quality headline. When the user sees your header, it should spark a deep sense of curiosity that they won’t be able to resist reading through.

It is even more effective when getting one or two keywords into your header. Web browser spiders are designed to identify such headlines and push them towards the first page of the search engine.

Related Article: How to Post an SEO Friendly Blog

6. Choose your Content Wisely

Search engine bots are getting more and more powerful. Although they don’t understand the words, they have the ability to read every word and fish out the keywords. To optimize a landing page or increase its visibility, you need to do more than just placing keywords in between the contents. It would help if you also made them stand out.

If you find out that all these are not working fine, you can look for synonyms of keywords and fix them into your content. One way to do this is by modifying them, making them bold, or putting them in italics. This will help bots understand what your page is about and fix it in its rightful place.

Lastly, on this point, pay detailed attention to your call to action. Make it convincing to the highest possible degree to attract your target market.

7. Be Mindful of Visually Impaired BOTs

As much as artificial intelligence is being deployed into the world of web browsers, it is not yet perfect.

To this end, it is essential that if you use images on your landing page, make sure you complete it with a short description that has the keyword embedded into it.

Related Article: Social Media and Lead Generation – How They Combine

Conclusion

Landing page optimization looks like a big deal. In truth, it is. However, when you have the details of what is involved, you’ll find it easier.

Don’t have the time to optimize your landing page? No worries, we got you! LeadAdvisors can help optimize your landing page and help you capture more leads up to tenfold! Ready to make your website a lean, mean, high conversion machine?

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