The world of marketing and advertising often uses the term ‘landing page’ in professional slang. This notion is particularly associated with campaigns and special promotions. Landing pages are created for attracting visitors, generating leads, and increasing conversions for the sake of income growth. To get better results, it is also necessary to get landing pages optimized for SEO purposes.
What Is a Landing Page?
While most pages on the web are perceived to be similar in their functionality, there are various kinds of web pages in fact. A landing page is one of the web page types that is usually created for a particular purpose and usually has an estimated shelf life.
The creation of the landing page usually occurs together with the start of the marketing campaign. Its purpose is to comprise all the necessary information about the promotional offer. That way, users will immediately explore the details of the marketing campaign and see possible options to proceed.
Unlike general web pages, every landing page has an exact purpose. This goal could be either to buy a jacket, register for the webinar by providing personal details, or subscribe to the company’s newsletter. Overall, the main purpose of every landing page is to generate more leads to bring more potential customers and ensure more conversions, which means that more page visitors are expected to turn into buyers.
What Is the Landing Page Structure?
Typical web pages carry out the informative or sales purpose on the website. Meanwhile, landing pages are specifically dedicated to enlarging the target audience and converting more potential customers into real ones. As a result, the structure of the landing page is different from that of the home page, for instance.
Every landing page is supposed to be concise and catchy, so its structure should be designed correspondingly. In comparison to a home page, which has plenty of elements on it, a landing page is usually restricted. It has only several necessary elements placed in a definite order on the page. Otherwise, many components on the landing page might distract users from the call to action.
The structure of the landing page might also vary depending on the purposes established by the marketing campaign. It could be designed in a different way depending on whether a user is expected to submit some personal data, get acquainted with the brand, or buy something online.
Lead generation landing page
The process of lead generation is done via the form where online users are supposed to enter their personal details. For that purpose, lead generation landing pages are created to convey the brand message to the audience. That could be an announcement about a free online webinar, trial download, or another event that potential customers could benefit from. Once users fill out the form with their personal data, marketers would be able to send special offers via email to those leads.
Click-through landing page
Another type of landing page is designed for the purposes of boosting online sales. Once a customer is landed on the dedicated page, there would be a button with the call to visit another product page on the company’s website. For instance, the landing page describes a 30% discount offer for certain products and then includes the link to the shop page with those products.
How to Create a Landing page?
Regardless of the type of the landing page, there is a variety of elements that should be obligatorily present on it. Extra components of the landing page might depend on whether it is destined for lead or sales generation. At the same time, a landing page should be concise and modest without any unnecessary distractive information on it.
Typically, a landing page is created in the content management system or the website builder. It should be made with the same tool that is used to create and manage the core business website.
Landing page purpose definition
Before designing the landing page layout, it is necessary to define what exactly do you expect from it. This could be made with the establishment of clear KPIs and the goals of the entire marketing campaign or promotional offer. Afterward, the layout of the landing page could be prototyped and designed onwards.
In case you want to collect only e-mail on your lead generation page, then the email field should be included, while other personal data fields could be neglected. If you want to collect more data on the landing page, include more fields but make sure that a user gets some bonus. Otherwise, users will not be likely to provide their personal data if nothing comes in return. When you need to create a click-through page, make sure that you provide a clear explanation of the offer and place a noticeable CTA button.
Hierarchy development
Once the preliminary layout of the landing page is clear, you can start arranging the elements in a more precise order. At this point, you might decide to reposition the elements on the page depending on what you expect from users. If you want them to see the image first, then it should appear at the top of the page. If you prefer the product description to be visible, then think of selecting the proper font. In fact, the process of arranging elements on the page grants plenty of flexibility, so there is a space for creativity at this stage.
This step comes after the clarification of the layout and the arrangement of the elements on the landing page. At this stage, more specific details related to design are outlined.
Make sure that the design of the landing page goes in line with the general design concepts in your company. It means that the brand colors, font, and other styling details should be the same as on the main website. Otherwise, the discrepancy between the design of your landing page and the styling of your business website would not be clear to users.
Any landing page is supposed to have some information on it which would explain to users why they are here. That is why it is crucial to create original easy-to-read text with catchy titles and headlines. As the purpose of any landing page is to convey a message briefly and clearly, the text should meet those requirements. That way users would get to the point faster and will not be distracted by unnecessary information.
Landing pages are more about the visual representation with minimum possible text on them. As people tend to perceive information mostly in a visual manner, it is recommended that a landing page has a corresponding image. Also, you might consider including some schemes, graphs, or tables where appropriate.
CTA generation
This is probably the most important component on the landing page as it completes the user action. In fact, the landing page is created with the CTA button in mind first. This element of the page should contain one or two words that explain to users what steps they take on this page. That is why it is necessary to think of every minor detail when generating the CTA button, considering the text, font, colors, shape.
Examples of SEO Landing Pages
Here you will find several samples of landing pages developed by famous brands. Those would help you to create your own landing pages keeping in mind the user experience and business goals.
This company offers a platform for course creation and distribution. Their landing page is dedicated to those who want to participate in training sessions to learn more about how the educational platform works. The title of the page is clear as it obviously states that people can monetize knowledge they are passionate about. All the details regarding the course, including the dates, duration, and fees are provided in bold large font. The field for submitting email is also present, and there are no excess details on the landing page. As a result, the landing page clearly conveys the message about the upcoming event and encourages users to register for it.
Codecademy is an educational platform that contains a variety of courses for those who would like to start programming. The landing page provided below is laconic as it has a clear title, corresponding image, and fields for collecting personal data. However, some details about the types of courses and programming languages are missing. This might be misleading for those who want to enroll in courses as they are not sure which ones are exactly available.
This is a famous multimedia platform providing thousands of films, TV series, and TV shows for its subscribers. The landing page clearly states the details of the offer and encourages a user to provide an email. It also does not have any redundant elements so that it takes users directly to the point.
How to Make a Landing Page SEO Optimized?
The traffic to a landing page usually comes from search engine advertisements like Google Ads, and social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Linkedin. All the abovementioned sources that drive traffic to landing pages require proper financing to bring the expected results.
Another way to drive traffic to the landing page is by including the link to it in the advertising email. In that case email marketing technique is used so that existing customers and potential leads included in the mailing list receive an email with the link to the landing page.
If you plan that your landing page stays for long on the web, you should consider SEO optimization. This process would include the same steps as for SEO optimization of typical web pages. All SEO efforts should be dedicated to on-page and off-page optimization techniques.
Best Practices for Landing Page SEO
General SEO approaches are talking about the optimization of on-page elements, and some of them can be also used for landing pages. As for the off-page techniques, link building for landing pages is essential if you want them to appear high on search results.
Learn More About Your Audience
As the primary purpose of any landing page is to interact with your audience, you should learn more about your existing customers and potential leads. This will help you to create an appealing landing page for the sake of generating more leads and increasing conversions.
To know your target audience better, you might conduct surveys on your social media platforms or other interactive platforms. Such polls will provide a better idea of who your consumers are and what they are interested in.
Explore Analytics
To start implementing SEO optimization for your landing page, you should analyze its performance first. With the help of the dedicated analytics tools, see where your online visitors come from, how long they stay on the page, and dive into other details. Also, see how many people have submitted their personal data on lead generation data or made purchases from the click-through pages. Such an analysis would provide you with a better idea of how your landing page performs and what should be improved there.
Select Keywords
While most of the landing page traffic comes from paid resources and platforms, SEO allows for obtaining a high ranking on Google. It means that landing page could appear organically on the web by typing corresponding keywords in the search field. That is why you should define how potential visitors are searching for your product or service Then analyze how you could rank against your competitors for the targeted keywords.
Decrease Page Load Time
Once users follow the link from the marketing email or click on the page from Google Ads, they want to land on it right away. If you page loads for ages, the users will likely leave it even before it gets fully loaded. That is why, you should evaluate the time load parameter and elaborate on the technical SEO in case it takes much time for your landing page to load.
Adjust Design
After analyzing statistics data and landing page performance with the help of dedicated tools, you would already better understand how users navigate through it. Based on that, you would be able to make certain adjustments of the page layout and elements design on the landing page.
Build Links
If you created a landing page for a short-term marketing campaign, then this aspect might not be of interest to you. However, if your landing page stays online for long, consider gaining backlinks for it. This SEO technique is best known for improving the web page rankings on the search engine results. Consider creating an outreach campaign, make guest posts, and link to your landing page from social media posts.
This content was originally published here.