How to create an seo-friendly landing page

What is a landing page?

A landing page is a stand-alone page on a website, designed specifically to focus on one subject or goal. This is the page the customer “lands” on and through it, they are led to a specific product, service or piece of information. These pages are goal-oriented, capturing the attention of the viewer to keep them interested and focused on a particular subject matter or action point. Landing pages are a great tool for increasing traffic conversions because they focus on one purpose or call to action (CTA) without overwhelming or distracting the visitor. They are simple but engaging pages with relevant information and content to the purpose of the page.

There are a few types of landing pages that come with different goals:

A landing page that will make a visitor “click” or navigate them to another page or part of your website.
A landing page with a sales intention, the purpose of the page is to convert.
A landing page to obtain visitor consent to follow up by email, for example, by including a registration.
A landing page that allows a visitor to share some information with a friend.
A landing page with the intention to teach the visitor something and may include posting a comment or giving some kind of feedback.

Whatever the goal may be it is most important to have this figured out before carrying on with any other steps of building a landing page. The goal is very important in shaping not only the content on the page but also the characteristics and features of the page. For example, there is a difference between a landing page built for SEO purposes and a page built solely for conversions. So the first step is to decide the purpose of your page before moving any further. If you already have your goal in mind, then we can move on to the next step.

Why should you build landing pages

We have talked about the purpose of a landing page and now we will go through some of the benefits of integrating landing pages to your websites.

Benefits of a landing page:

Improving your brand awareness;
More conversion and sales;
Saving time and increasing efficiency;
Leading your customers to a specific product/service;
Helping you to understand your target audience’s behavior and customer journey;
Landing pages have fewer distractions, which leads to a better focus on your purpose/offer;
Helps you to segment your target audience;
It encourages your audience to take action;
Gives you the opportunity to create hyper-specific pages for niche/long tail keywords.

With a landing page, you can gain valuable insight into the behavior of your target audience. Using analysis software like Microsoft Clarity or HotJar, you can track and monitor where your target audience clicked, scroll depth, and where they left the page. This makes it easier for you to optimize your landing page in a manner most useful to your visitors and optimize your pages that may be lagging behind.

Quite often, one of the common goals for our clients’ is to optimize a website for SEO to ensure their pages are more visible in Google rankings. Therefore, it is the goal of these businesses to build SEO friendly landing pages. Considering the many benefits of SEO-friendly landing pages, you should already be excited about adapting these measures to your own webpages. But before we move any further, let’s get a basic understanding of SEO.

What is the Search engine optimization?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process that involves optimizing web pages and websites to improve their rankings in search engines like Google. Google search is one of the main ways in which people discover content online. Essentially the higher your website ranks, the more traffic your website receives.

What is an SEO-friendly landing page?

SEO landing pages are pages optimized for search engines – with features and characteristics that make them, especially appealing to the algorithms that decide whether a page is valuable to searchers.

Building an SEO-friendly page, helps to direct as much traffic as possible from the right target audience to your landing page. However, regardless of whatever goals you have for your landing pages, it is always beneficial to consider implementing SEO practices and building SEO friendly pages to direct the right set of eyes to your website.

Types of landing pages

Earlier, we outlined the different goals behind landing pages and now we will go through the types of landing pages that are best suited to the different goals and purposes. At this point in the page building process you should have the goal of your landing page, content and information you wish to share locked down. The next step is to find the right type of landing page to suit your business and your audience. We are going to go through some of the most common landing pages and their benefits. We’ll go through these examples of landing pages, to help you find out which page matches your purpose. Building the right landing page can help you attract your ideal customer and approach them in the right way.

Click-Through Landing page

Click-through landing pages are pages that can often be identified by their prominent CTA that leads to a new page (click-through). The purpose of this landing page is to redirect visitors to a page that leads directly to another page. A click-through landing page can be used to “warm up” your visitors by showing them, for example, an offer, specific information, some testimonials (which are great for social proof), or demonstrating a free offer in this first stage of the funnel. You can use this to build customer trust in your brand which in turn will lead to building a greater relationship and connection with the visitor which then leads them. However, if a click-through landing page is not compelling or engaging, it can drive visitors away therefore it is important to make your page interesting and attractive to your target audience.

A click-through landing page gives your visitors the proverbial push to become more confident to trust your business. For example, you can build a click-through landing page to move visitors towards a transactions page or towards the next stage of your goal.

Long-Form Landing page

A Long-form landing page is designed to give conversions through more in-depth explanations about your product/service.

This page is especially useful if you need to convince people to buy your product/service or get to know more information about your business. If your audience does not know much about your company, they need to understand your product/service first, to pass the awareness stage of the funnel. Secondly, a long-form landing page may be useful for your website if your product requires a higher interaction rate of the customer, for them to fully understand the value of your business or service/product. For example, you may have a top-quality product that is too expensive for some people, you can explore and explain the benefits and unique selling points of these products for the customers and page visitors. You may also have a product that is more complex and requires more detailed explanation for people to understand the real value of the product.

Video Landing page

A video landing page is an entertaining and more engaging way to show something about your business! This is a great choice because it uses visual content to illustrate points that would otherwise have been written. Audio-visual content is more stimulating and is more likely to grab and maintain the attention of your visitor for much longer. You can creatively hype up your business while showing the personality of the business or product. People are far more likely to engage with audio-visual content. There are so many reasons for building a video landing page and you can find some of them here below:

How do videos help sell your your product:

Videos are one of the fastest ways to get your audience’s attention;
Video content builds an emotional connection with your audience;
Video content can improve the customer understanding of your product;
Video content keeps your visitors on your website for a longer period of time and increases the chances of them exploring further into your website;
Videos entertain your audience;
Videos that are engaging and convincing can attract new customers;
Videos build trust;
Videos encourage people to share, building awareness for your business and product.

Create an seo-friendly landing page

Creating an SEO-friendly page, also means creating a valuable page for the Search engine.

With an SEO-friendly landing page, your page is more likely to tick off more and more from the list below, which in turn makes the search engines happy. It helps to create pages with:

Unique and high-quality content;
Content that matches your business and its target audience;
A logical structure;
A page that’s empowered by some high-quality backlinks;
Make your content shareable;
Include valuable keywords;
Do a technical check on the meta description, header tags, title tag, and image names.

The technical and strategic aspects of SEO aside, it is also very important to make sure you know how the content should be written, and in what ways this may differ from other forms of content you produce.

Solving your customer’s problems

One thing you should know about landing pages is that the page is focused on solving customers’ problems. I hear you, what does that even mean? Well pain points are the problems that a customer is experiencing in their life. A customer’s pain point is the emotion they feel when they think about a certain need, weakness, struggle, or unfulfilled desire(s) they haven’t found a solution for yet. This could be for example about emotional pain: low-self esteem, self-love, or confidence. But also, physical pain: back problems, headaches, etc. There are many different problems that can often be traced back to a psychological background. It’s important to understand which problems your product/service solves for your target audience, to be able to focus on and optimize your landing page accordingly. So here’s a small to-do for you: make a list of the problems your audience is facing, and match those problems with the information you’re going to supply them with to ease their pains.

Example:

Financial pain points:

Your customer has a limited budget or is spending too much money on a service/product that doesn’t work, or perhaps the client would like to increase revenue.

Solution: You’re offering a product that is really worth their money (tell them why), or maybe your product is much more budget-friendly, compared to the competition. With this solution, you offer a product that promises to be the best investment and long term money saving option for your client or customer.

Optimize your landing page: Emphasize a lower price in comparison to the competition and highlight the average saving your product has brought to your client base.

Optimizing your Landing page for a target audience

Having a good understanding of your target audience, and the things they experience, can have a lot of impact on the way you make a landing page work for your audience. The landing page should appeal to the target audience, and by finding out more about them, it’s more likely to get them to a particular destination or purpose. Therefore, determine who the target audience of your landing page is, and try to match their wishes as much as possible. Google’s biggest priority is to provide high-quality information that helps their visitors to find what they are searching for. Matching your landing page, with a target audience, is a critical and essential baseline for the user experience. To make sure your page connects with the target audience, you are much more likely to have the page visited by that audience.

The steps to build an seo-friendly landing page

At this point you should have a clear picture of the goal of your landing page, the type of landing page you want to create and what SEO functions you would like to implement in your landing page. Now you are ready to go through the steps you need to build a high-quality landing page. Let’s get started with the right steps to build your perfect landing page!

Step 1: Determine your keywords

An essential aspect of an SEO-friendly page, is making sure the content includes valuable and relevant keywords. Before you start building a landing page, make sure you know which keywords you are going to use in the content. Next, build a text structure and make sure your keywords show up in the content. Another very important thing, don’t try to push these keywords by using them too much, otherwise, it will be counterproductive. Keep the landing page looking as natural as possible. To find the right keywords, you can use SEO tools, and it’s also important that the keywords fit the type of target audience, your company, and the content. Next, build a text structure and make sure your keywords show up in the content. Try to implement your keywords organically taking care not to stuff your text with keywords as this can be counterproductive. Keep the landing page looking as natural as possible.

Step 2: A good-looking headline

A headline catches your audience’s attention and after reading the first sentence, the reader decides whether to read on or leave the page. So there is a lot riding on those first few lines. I can hear you thinking…but what can I write that would impress my audience the most? A captivating headline is relevant, emotionally captivating and clear relevance, emotion and clarity.

Relevance

If you want to build a landing page, behind an advertisement, make sure your ad and headline connect by telling the same story. There is a specific reason why your audience visited your page. If you promised a discount in your ad, you can’t write a headline that completely ignores the discount. So, make sure your headline tells the same message to your visitors as the ad you’re serving them.

Emotion

Show empathy and use a headline that builds a connection between your brand and the visitor. An emotional connection to your business, or the product, reinforces their pain points. This will make it easier for you to solve their pain points, by subsequently showing your product.

Clarify

Remember: get to the point! Your audience has no time to think about complicated or long sentences. Short and clear sentences will make the most impact. Include a CTA in your headline and your audience will be ready to take action!

A great example that connects all three is Steve Jobs’s iconic slogan for Apple.

“Think different”

Why did this slogan make so much impact? There were a few reasons, why it did;

It was short and easy to remember;
This slogan is also a call to action;
This slogan made a statement, and the story behind the slogan created an emotional connection with their audience, by showing what Apple stands for;
This slogan made Apple stand out from its competition.

Step 3: The problem

Your audience will come to you because they have a problem, and they are looking for a solution to their problem. It is your job to solve their problem with your product/service and convince them with your landing page. Make sure you know what their problem could be and how your product could fix it. That’s why you need to show their pain point, and clarify how you’re going to remedy it.

Step 4: The solution/your services/the offer

Show the benefits and details of your product! This is the key factor in selling your product. A landing page should always be focused on the offer and the solution to their ‘problem’. So the product must therefore take center stage. Professional visuals and qualitative copywriting can help you to make your product stand out. To explain the power of high-quality videos and images, we will use the following scenario:

Imagine you are watching TV and you are craving a snack but you are not sure what snack you want. All of a sudden, a commercial for Magnum ice cream fills your TV screen. It shows you the best shots of delicious melting chocolate and someone that looks fully satisfied when eating that ice cream. This image won’t leave your mind, and now all you want is to have that ice cream. This is the power of high-quality videos and images.

So make sure your landing page contains:

High-quality images or a video
The video/image must show the details and benefits of your product
Make sure your images do have the right size to prevent technical issues

Use emotional triggers in the image or video

Step 5: Impeccable grammar

This is such an important step, always make sure your copywriting is stellar. If you’re focusing on an international market, make sure natives write your content. Impeccable grammar can make or break the success of your copy. A piece of content riddled with grammatical errors will reduce the confidence your audience has in your product and services. So this step is short and simple: create flawless copy.

Step 6: Use testimonials

People buy what others have bought before them. Why? Because if others say it’s the real deal, it probably is! Social proof is an invaluable part of your landing page. So make sure to add testimonials and reviews to your pages (especially in cases where the pages are created for commercial purposes).

Step 7: Use a call-to-actions and eye-catching buttons

Buttons need to stand out on your landing page, they must be clearly visible and make an impact, that leads to direct action.

Make your text easy to read, use white spaces, and choose a large and memorable font;
Use contrasting colors;
Make it noticeable;
Use an action-based text;
Write personalized copy
Rule: always place the first CTA above the fold.

What makes a good landing page?

Great! You’ve made it to the end and now you are equipped with all the steps you need to create an effective and impactful landing page. As a bonus, we’ve created a quick summary in the checklist below, to walk through all the bullet points once again. Be sure not to make any common mistakes that will cost your visitors and good luck with your landing page!

Checklist:

What to include and focus on, when building a landing page:

A clearly visible and highly contrasting call-to-action button;
Customer testimonials;
Use valuable keywords;
A strong headline;
Use scannable text/ content;
Use the benefits of your products/service;
Focus on clarity;
Strong visuals to make your offer look appealing.

Important note:

LESS IS MORE.

A landing page is meant to focus on one specific purpose. This means too many distractions could kill your landing page and takes you further away from your goals. Think about an overwhelming design that catches more attention than your product/service. Or irrelevant content, or too much information. Another distraction could be, for example, using bad typography. To prevent building a landing page that doesn’t work, we’ve also made a checklist of the things you should avoid.

How to create an SEO-friendly landing page