Drive people to your site—and then keep them there 

Optimizing your website to boost organic traffic is a no-brainer—but are you doing everything you can to get the most hits possible? In an extremely competitive market, some of the best SEO strategy thinks outside the box, capitalizing on every opportunity to attract a target audience. 

Landing pages: the next SEO frontier 

One of the landing page’s primary functions is to create an enjoyable and understandable user experience—especially for readers who are arriving to your site for the first time. This alone is a good reason to make sure you keep SEO in mind when building landing pages, especially when conversion is the end goal of ranking in search results. Optimizing your landing page will help drive people to your site—and the content and accessibility of what they find will be the determining factor in whether or not they stick around.

Your landing page should provide an immediate call to action (CTA) related to the keywords you’re targeting, but also clear paths to other pages within your site that contain their own CTAs and information points. Reeling searchers in with good SEO and then snagging their attention with compelling landing page content and then linking to other areas of your site is a surefire way to create lasting impressions that will result in conversion.

What makes a good landing page? 

Keep it simple. Your landing page should contain several key elements (which we will break down in a moment), but the most important thing to remember is that it should be a very clear and easy to understand page that directs readers to other related parts of your site. Don’t let your desire for increased rank come at the sacrifice of page quality. 

Important elements: 

• Headline
  • Your headline should be clear and informative—snag your reader’s attention and show them how they can directly benefit from what you’re offering. Make it feel like it will be a major loss for them to stop reading now. This is also one of the most beneficial places to strategically use your keyword/phrase. 
• Description of the offer and its benefits to your audience
  • This is where you can go into a bit more detail about what you’re offering and potentially link to other sections of your site. Including testimonials/reviews and more information about the offer itself can be helpful. 
• Related images or video
  • Another great place to boost overall readability and site aesthetics while also offering an opportunity to increase SEO. Optimizing your images/videos by utilizing alt-text and captions is an often under-used way to boost SEO. 
• A call-to-action or subscription form
  • Here’s the money-maker. It’s great to get people to your site, but forward-moving action will always be king over simply clicks and views. Develop a CTA that is clearly visible and separate from the rest of the text—a button or subscription form of some sort in a color that pops is usually the way to go. 
• Note: General SEO best practices like being mobile-friendly and quick to load are applicable to your landing page as well.

Landing pages may be temporary and campaign-focused, but keeping in mind the potential for them to be evergreen is important. Don’t waste precious time and energy creating amazing content that will be switched out before your SEO research has even had a chance to show results. The content you invest your time in now should have the future in mind—with the potential to generate leads not just in the present, but long into the future as well. 

Your landing page is a tool—with these SEO tips in mind, you’ll be well on your way to using it well!