Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
What is a landing page?
Let’s just have a look at what a landing page is. So, this is the definition by Neil Patel, who’s actually got a really good SEO blog:
A landing page is any webpage where you send visitors in order to initiate a conversation and close a deal. Effective landing pages are often webpages with a single focus.
That’s really key, the single focus, and we’ll talk more about that single focus in a moment.
Do all webpages need to be optimized?
Let’s just have a look at these two examples.
So, in marker 1, we can see it’s the terms and conditions page, and marker 2, we can see it’s for a sprained ankle page. Now, it doesn’t really make sense to optimize the terms and conditions page. There aren’t keywords there that we need to be ranking for. So, we won’t optimize that page, and there will be probably quite a few pages on your site that you choose not to optimize.
So, when we talk about landing pages, even though it could be any page on your site, that is the entry point for SEO traffic. That’s the sort of the stripped definition. When we refer to SEO landing pages, it’s pages that we’re actively targeting for keywords and that we’re actively targeting for traffic.
What makes up a successful landing page?
Here are the characteristics of a successful landing page?
- Focuses on one topic: As Neil Patel says, it should have a single focus. So, we need to focus on one topic and at times, that means focusing on a specific subtopic, not just a topic in itself, which we’ll come onto in a moment.
- Satisfies the searcher intent: So, when you go on Google or another search engine, there’s some intent behind what you’re searching for and you want to be satisfied that you get what you’re looking for. So, we need to bear that in mind.
- Optimized keywords: We need to think about where we’re placing these keywords on the page.
- Call to action: There’s usually some call-to-action as well. It may be “leave a comment” on a blog post. It may be to buy something. It may be to download a PDF.
Consequences of working keywords into the wrong landing page
What are the main consequences?
- It’s going to be a bad user experience, which will probably mean the users will bounce. So, they will probably go back to Google, if that’s where they’ve come from.
- Search engines will probably realize that it’s a bad fit for the page itself in terms of what keywords you’re targeting. So, you probably won’t rank as well on search engines.
- If you are working in the wrong keywords to a page, you’re actually missing out on working the right keywords into that page.
Joe Williams
Managing Director and SEO Trainer at Zen Optimise
- Founder and SEO Trainer at Zen Optimise with 10 years’ experience in Search Engine Optimization
- Zen Optimise is a London-based digital marketing training company
- SEO consultant and trainer for hundreds of small, medium, and blue chip companies including Qantas Airlines, Sky, Eurostar, EasyCruise, and Anti-Slavery
