The goal of a landing page is to lead potential customers to convert. If you want to do two things at once, lead your audience to convert and bring more traffic to the landing page, you need to follow SEO best practice for landing pages. Knowing how to get a landing page to rank is what makes this possible.
In this article we define what an SEO-optimised landing page is and walk you through landing page SEO best practice.
What is an SEO landing page?
An SEO-optimised landing page is a page designed to attract organic search traffic for keywords relevant to your business. Its end goal is to get visitors to take a conversion action, such as:
- Downloading a resource
- Leaving their contact details
- Signing up as a lead
- Signing up for a free trial
- Making a purchase
SEO landing pages are usually part of an inbound marketing campaign that aims to increase website traffic from organic search.
What makes a landing page effective for SEO?
Because these pages have to lead users towards a conversion, SEO landing pages need to:
- Get straight to the point.
- Offer a pleasant user experience.
- Have a clear, convincing call to action (CTA), matched to the query and the searcher's intent.
Let's look in detail at how to build an effective SEO landing page.
Landing page SEO best practice
Now that you know what an SEO landing page is, let's go through this SEO checklist to improve your rankings and conversions:
- Carry out keyword research and analysis
- Align your landing page content and design with search intent
- Optimise your landing pages' on-page elements
- Publish your landing pages on your own domain
- Audit your landing pages regularly.
Let's take them one at a time:
1. Carry out keyword research and analysis
You may already have a list of long-tail keywords for your website's wider SEO work. That is a good starting point for your keyword research.
For your SEO landing pages, do some extra keyword research to find relevant transactional keywords, the ones that belong to the action stage of the funnel. Transactional keywords often contain words like "price", "buy" or "sale" because the user is ready to purchase.
Optimise your SEO landing page with relevant, long-tail keywords that match your audience's transactional search intent.
Alongside keyword research, look at your industry and your competitors. What new customer behaviour have you noticed? What are your competitors doing?
Your target audience may be looking for a specific feature of your product, along with attractive offers. Optimise your SEO landing page with relevant, long-tail keywords that match your audience's transactional search intent. Include the keywords in:
- The heading and subheadings
- The title tag and meta description
- Image file names and alt text.
Use keywords naturally across the page and in the copy. Do not overdo it: keyword stuffing can backfire and hurt your rankings.
2. Align your landing page content and design with search intent
Now that you have done your keyword research and analysis, you know the relevant transactional keywords people use.
The next item on our list of landing page SEO tips is to align the page's content and layout with search intent. This keeps visitors engaged on the landing page and makes a conversion more likely. Break the content into sections so the landing page is easy to scan.
Could a shopping guide or an interactive tool built into the landing page match the search intent? If so, consider adding it to your SEO landing page.
If you are embedding forms in your SEO landing page, keep them simple and intuitive. Collect only the information you need from prospects. Very few fields may encourage unqualified leads to sign up. On the other hand, a form with too many fields adds friction for the user and discourages qualified leads from converting.
If the landing page's content and layout answer the search intent, search engines such as Google will see the page as useful to users and may reward it with a better position in the SERPs. This is central to getting a landing page to rank.
Tip: make sure your SEO landing page is optimised for mobile devices, like the rest of your site. Your content and CTAs have to be visible on every device.
3. Optimise your landing pages' on-page elements
Help search engine crawlers understand your landing pages better by optimising on-page elements. This covers several elements, which we go through below:
Title tag
The title tag is the page title shown in the SERPs, so make sure it grabs your target audience's attention and matches their search intent exactly. Put your target keywords in the title tag to show the page is relevant to users.
Meta description
Search engines also use meta descriptions in the SERPs, so write one that persuades users to click through to your page. Using relevant keywords in the meta description is also good landing page SEO practice.
Headings and subheadings
Use an H1 heading tag that contains the keyword. It can be similar to the title tag or a variation of it.
Section subheadings give search engines an idea of your landing page's structure and help them understand the topics covered. They also help visitors navigate the page, so they can jump straight to the section that is most useful to them.
Images
Follow image SEO best practice by renaming files and adding alt text that briefly describes each image. This way, people using screen readers can understand what the image shows.
Alt text also gives search engines context about the image, since they cannot read images themselves.
Use high-quality images that support your landing page content. Place them next to the text they relate to to give context to search engines and make the content easier for readers to follow.
Compress images to reduce file size without losing quality. This lets you optimise them for both quality and loading speed, which brings us to the next point on the list.
Page speed
Page loading speed matters for ranking on Google because it is part of the Core Web Vitals. Use tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights to analyse your landing pages' Core Web Vitals.
Internal links
Internal links are one of the landing page SEO practices that help both users and search engines. They let search engines understand how your landing pages relate to other content and pages on the site.
They also let you point users to relevant content they may find useful along their buying journey. For example, you can link to a relevant category page you mention in your copy. Make sure the CTA is the most prominent link.
4. Publish your landing pages on your own domain
Another good practice for SEO landing pages is to host and publish them on your own domain rather than on separate services and different domains.
The result is more consistent, and your audience knows they are dealing directly with your business and leaving their details with a company they can trust.
It also helps your search rankings, since your domain authority can carry over to your landing pages.
5. Audit your landing pages regularly along with your website
When you run regular site audits, include your landing pages and check for pages returning 404 errors or 302 redirects.
Update your landing pages proactively with relevant content or new interactive guides that answer the search intent. Have you built a quiz or a calculator that helps your target audience choose the best offer? Embed it in your SEO landing page to improve the user experience.
[Bonus] Advanced SEO tips for your landing pages
That covers the basics. Now for some more advanced tips for experienced practitioners:
1. Use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to start measuring usability and conversion metrics
Google ranks a lot of content partly on how users behave on those pages. If your page cannot hold users' attention as well as the competition, it will quickly slide to page 2 (or further).
PPC can be a quick way to start gaining ground here. Try spending £500-1,000 on PPC ads for the keywords you want to rank for and watch metrics such as the engagement rate to see where you need to improve.
For example, if these ads bring no conversions, organic rankings probably will not either: it is better to find out first where the conversion path breaks.
While you wait for Google to rank your page organically, getting traffic from other channels helps you spot the weak points in your content.
Fixing them straight away can give you months' worth of data in the first week your ads run. That is useful information for improving organic rankings.
2. A/B test your pages for better conversion rates
Do not stop optimising a page just because it already ranks and gets traffic. A/B testing tools can help you find more ways to keep that traffic engaged or convert it better.
Many different A/B testing tools can help you find more engaging content strategies or CTAs that convert better.
For instance, a heatmap tool can tell you a lot about how users interact with your content. A navigation button in the right place can stop users from bouncing back to the search results.
Google rewards content that answers users' questions, and A/B testing tools help you see exactly how those answers should look on your landing page. Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) services usually include these kinds of tests and tools.
3. Adapt your content as search intent changes
Google favours fresh content over old, outdated pages. Search intent can shift a lot over a year or more. Sometimes it changes seasonally: peak season tends to bring more bottom-of-funnel visitors than the off-season does.
Thinking about how to adapt your content lets you answer what users are looking for at any given time as their intent changes. Monitoring and adjusting your strategy on an ongoing basis is how landing pages keep their rankings.
Improve your landing page SEO performance
Your business will benefit from optimising its landing pages, with more traffic and more conversions. Give your landing page SEO a boost by getting in touch today to start working with our team of specialists.
