Landing pages are very important tools in marketing your products or services or calling your prospects to take action. In fact, most landing pages ask a visitor to take some kind of action. It could be subscribing to a newsletter, reading a message, sharing a link or even going ahead and making a purchase. Landing pages gained popularity simply because they are akin to main websites but have a specific function – call to action.
Thus, the importance of landing pages is only growing across the world. With their increasing importance, there also comes the need to design them in a better and more accessible manner. This involves building landing pages according to the changing needs of SEO. As we all know, SEO is something that continuously changes over a period of time.
In this article, let us take a look at how you can optimize your landing pages for better SEO and ultimately, get more people to respond to your call to action.
1. Focus on your URL
When it comes to landing pages, we often think it is not important to focus on the URL. The idea is, the URL of a landing page is unimportant because one just has to link it from an external website where no one will actually see the actual URL. They would either click on a banner, an image or some sort of textual matter.
However, it is very important to have a unique URL for your landing page. It is important to have a custom tail end, which is not only descriptive but also specific. Of course, you need not be stuffing your landing page’s URL with keywords though it helps to keep it descriptive. If it is a Twitter campaign, you could have a /twitter-campaign as your custom tail end.
If you have a number of such landing pages, it makes sense to organize all your landing pages with custom URLs so that you can identify your landing pages in a clearer way. It is important to install Google Analytics script on every landing page so that you can measure and track your progress as it happens. A number of people overlook the importance of custom URLs in landing pages but now it is quite clear that they are important.
2. Maintain brand uniformity
There are a number of companies, which fail to realize the importance of brand uniformity. They have landing pages designed by someone else in a completely different manner because they fancied a new design. They are making a fatal error. A landing page is a subsidiary of the main page, even if it is able to stand on its own. Thus, you need to ensure that your landing page has the same design, color scheme, font and format as your main page or any other online property.
In fact, you can use your landing page to get people to visit your main website. When your website looks completely different from your landing page, the visitor might find it jarring. Even psychologically, it creates a sense of disconnect, which you don’t want to let happen. A landing page needs to, thus, have your core message and core branding factors inscribed into it.
Always ensure that you keep your landing page’s design in sync with your regular branding. This helps to keep your landing pages, your website, your blogs and just about anything else in a cohesive fashion, tying everything to the company you are eventually trying to promote.
3. Focus on your content
Your copy need not be verbose and professorial. Nobody has the time to read through a lot of statistics and figures when they visit your landing page. Your landing page’s copy is either persuasive or it is not. If it is not, people will simply not spend more time on your landing page, leave alone responding to your call to action.
The trick is to write copy that is simple, minimalist and effective. It need not be concise and you need to hire experienced copywriters in order to achieve the intended result. You need not ever stuff your content with keywords and you need not use complex jargons. In fact, we can say that your landing page copy need to be similar to your web copy, albeit much more minimalist and simpler.
Do not copy and paste all your landing page content from some other page of yours. This will affect not only your visitor’s perception but also a search engine’s idea of how unique your website is. Write copy in a persuasive way, which answers the questions you probably had asked when a prospect had clicked on the link. Ensure that your landing page answers the questions for which the prospects arrived on the page to begin with.
4. Keep the design minimalist
While it is true that your landing page needs to look similar to your main website, it need not also have the same amount of images, texts and other content, which might distract the visitor from the main purpose – call to action.
It is very important to keep the landing page plain and simple. This helps to keep the attention of visitors focused. Your landing page need not end up becoming a platform for you to brag, boast or promote aspects of your company that is not related with the actual purpose of the landing page. The design needs to be similar to the main website but it needs to be a stripped down version of it.
Also, make sure that you do not ask too many questions to the prospect. Just asking them to fill out their first name, last name and email address would be sufficient. If you ask for too many pieces of information, they will simply close the page and move on to the next website. It is very important to not distract the visitor and ensure that they respond to your call to action. For this, you will need to keep the design as minimalistic and simplistic as possible.
5. Plan for the future
A landing page needs to be constantly monitored and bugs need to be fixed, if they are found. It is important to maintain landing pages and ensure that there aren’t any downtimes. Many a times, people create landing pages and simply forget about them, while they continue to pay a lot of attention to the main website. The same attention must be paid to landing pages as well.
This is very important because if the landing pages are not attended to, they will quickly become static if you do not analyze the statistics and the conversions. It is important to also have a plan for those who become customers. Ensure that they subscribe to your email newsletters and also that you give certain privileges to them. What kind of privileges you would give them is something that cannot be discussed in this article but it’s important to have a game plan before launching a landing page.
Last but not the least, make sure that you come up with a carefully planned promotion campaign so that the landing page appears in places where there is likely to be a high click rate. Even that will help the SEO in the long term.
Final thoughts
Landing pages are becoming increasingly important. It is important to ensure that these are maintained and kept in a good condition so that search bots find them & index them. It is important to keep the copy and design clear & consistent with the main website.
Search engines keep updating their algorithms and it is not possible to have a singular SEO strategy. Thus, if we are talking about landing pages that are SEO optimized, we need to be all the more careful. It, in fact, takes a village to come up with a landing page that is not only great to look at but also functional in terms of search engine optimization. By following the above tips, you can ensure that your landing page is SEO-friendly and that it remains accessible to a vast majority of your target audience.
