Your landing pages are some of the most important pages in your digital marketing armory. They’re the pages that get you leads, and at the end of the day, that’s exactly what your website is there to do.
We often associate landing pages with PPC advertising, but optimizing them to rank well in the SERPs and to convert leads is crucial.
So, what exactly is landing page optimization, and how can it tie in with your SEO?
What is Landing Page Optimization (LPO)?
Landing page optimization is all about streamlining your page to better convert your goals. Those goals are going to be creating a lead by getting someone to fill in a form, or making a sale.
Either way, it’s not easy to get people to take your desired action, and landing page optimization is about making sure every part of your page is geared towards getting people to convert on your goals more often.
While the goals of SEO are slightly different, in that it’s focused on making sure a page is perfectly optimized to rank at the top of the SERPs for your target keywords, there is a lot of cross-over between the two. You want to get the best ROI you possibly can from your landing page, which requires a high conversion rate, but also requires you to get targeted traffic to your page.
The best way to do this is to use your SEO to bring in free, organic clicks to your page, and use LPO to boost your conversion rate.
Here are a few tactics that will help:
Limit the Number of Actions That Can be Taken on a Page
The goals of a landing page are very narrow: to create leads and generate sales. If you want to achieve these goals, then you want to take away as many other distractions as possible. You want to drive your visitors through a funnel where they end up taking the actions you want them to take, so the more options you give them, the more chances they have to deviate from the funnel.
It’s like talking to someone when you’ve got the TV on in the background behind you, if there are lots of distractions, then you’re going to struggle to get your message across, and they’re less likely to take the action you want them to take.
This means your landing pages need to be nice and clean, with a limited number of links, ad-free, and only making use of pop-ups that serve the purpose of the landing page. In their place, you need strong, clear calls to action that prompt people to take the desired action.
How Does This Tie in with SEO?
One of the key elements of good SEO is offering the user a good experience.
When you go to a website, you want quick and easy access to the information you’re interested in; you don’t want to be sifting through irrelevant links, pop ups, and content to find what you’re looking for.
SEO and landing page optimization (LPO) cross over here because they both require logical structure and a clean, easy to navigate experience. If you can give your visitors this, then it’s not only going to boost your conversion rate, but it’s also going to please the search engines.
Concisely Articulate the Value of What’s Being Offered
When someone comes to your landing page, they’re not choosing it because it’s the only option they have. If they want to get their information somewhere else it will take them two seconds, so you’ve got to prove early on in your copy that you’re offering something of value to the reader - the answer to their question.
Here, with our “Discover How to Dominate B2B SEO” landing page, you can see the value proposition is layed out immediately — “advice on how to do SEO right”
All the information you could want is set out in an easy to consume way and there are absolutely no distractions. The page is set up to answer the visitor’s question, and get people to fill out the form. Nothing more.
Once that question has been answered, a clear call to action guides people to take the desired action and become a lead.
How Does This Tie in with SEO?
This ties in perfectly with one of the most fundamental aspects of SEO - answering the questions your target audience is asking. To do this, you’ve got to be familiar with your buyer personas and what questions they are asking.
If you’re answering these questions in a thorough way, then you’re going to find your landing page ranking for its target keywords.
People rightly focus a lot on keyword research in this area, but another option is simply asking your customers what it is they’re searching for and how they’re carrying out those searches. Once you’ve got these answers, you can tailor your LPO and SEO accordingly.
Match Your Visitors' Expectations
Whether someone has arrived at your landing page through an organic listing, PPC ad, social media post, or an email link, they’ve come because you’ve promised them something.
For an organic listing, this can be done through your titles and meta description which give people information about what’s on the page. However, if what you’re promising doesn’t reflect what’s actually on the page, then you’re going to find people aren’t going to convert like you would like them to.
For example, if your title and meta description suggest you’re going to show people the 5 best ways to make your warehouse more efficient, but your landing page is only focused on selling your warehouse management software, it’s not going to work out.
You might have found a way to get people to your page, but you’re not meeting their expectations, which gives them little incentive to continue through your sales funnel.
Each landing page has to reflect the expectations of the visitor if it’s to be effective, and this means the page must follow through on the promise you have made to people in your listing.
How Does This Tie in With SEO?
Part of SEO is optimizing your titles and meta descriptions to improve your click-through rate, but if you’re not getting the right people to your pages, then it’s going to have an adverse effect.
Google pays attention to metrics such as the amount of time people spend on your page to decide how valuable the content is. If people spend lots of time on the page, then it’s a good sign that your content is of a high-quality and worthy of ranking.
However, if people are coming to your page expecting to see something else, and their questions don’t get answered, then they’re not going to stick around for long and interact with the content.
LPO like SEO is about answering the right questions, and if the realities of your page don’t match your visitors’ expectations, then it’s going to hurt both.
Find Ways of Getting People’s Contact Details
Getting people to your site isn’t easy, so you want to make the most of the visitors you do get.
It generally takes more than one touchpoint with a customer to create a sale, which is why one of the main goals of a landing page is to get people’s contact details.
Once you’ve achieved this goal, then you can start to build a relationship with that person and gradually convert them into a customer. However, if you don’t get contact details, and you don’t make a sale, then you might have lost that visitor forever, which is one of the reasons contact forms are so prominent on landing pages.
Often though, companies are too eager to take people’s contact details without thinking about what they offer in return. If you want something, then you’ve got to offer something in exchange, so think of ways you can offer value to your visitors in return for their contact details.
In this example, we offer a free SEO consultation in return for someone’s email address. This gives people an extra incentive to hand over their contact details, and from there, we can create multiple touchpoints with our potential customers.
All the calls to action reinforce the point that you’re getting value from giving us your contact details, and the “see what our customers are saying about us” box adds social proof to back up this idea of getting value.
How Does This Tie in With SEO?
This point plays out in exactly the same way in SEO. Every click is valuable, so you want to make the most of it.
One of the things that’s going to convince people to hand over their contact details is if they see you as an authoritative, trustworthy source. When you’re practicing good SEO and ranking in the top positions in Google’s SERPs, this is exactly what you establish.
By establishing your website as an authoritative source in the eyes of Google, you’re going to increase the chances that people are willing to give you their contact details.
It’s got to be Mobile-friendly and It’s got to Load Fast
If your landing page doesn’t work properly on mobile or takes too long to load, then people aren’t going to stick around and find out what it’s all about.
The majority of traffic today is on mobile, so any problems your page has loading on these devices is going to alienate a large chunk of your audience right off the bat. People have a lot of choice about where they get their information, and if they’re forced to wait, or aspects of the page don’t work, they’ll simply go somewhere else.
The faster your page loads, and the better it works on mobile, the lower your bounce rate is going to be, and the better your conversion rate is going to be.
You invest time, energy, and money into getting each person to your website, so you can’t afford to lose people because of technical issues such as these. The faster you can fix these issues, the quicker you will see your SERP rankings improve.
How Does This Tie in With SEO?
Mobile usability and load speeds are extremely important to Google, and this shows through Google’s mobile-first indexing. Mobile-first indexing means that Google predominantly looks at the mobile version of your content for indexing and rankings.
If that content isn’t optimized for mobile, then you’re going to find it much more difficult to feature at the top of the rankings. So, slow pages and poor mobile usability aren’t just going to affect your conversion rates, they’re also going to bomb your chances of getting organic clicks. This means your cost of getting people to your landing page goes up, while your ability to convert those clicks goes down; it’s a double whammy on your ROI.
Takeaways
It’s absolutely possible to have landing pages that are perfectly optimized to convert your goals while still featuring heavily in the SERPs, and there are lots of companies that do it successfully.
If you’re doing landing page optimization well, then this is going to tie in with many of the key principles of search engine optimization such as answering the questions your audience is asking, fast load speeds, mobile optimization, meeting people’s expectations, and offering a good user experience.
When you do this, you’ll not only find that you convert more visitors, but you’ll also find your rankings will benefit and you’ll have more people clicking to your page.
