Do you know when to optimize your landing pages for search?
In Part 3 of the Creating Effective Landing Pages blog series we discussed creating social landing pages, but social media shouldn’t get to have all the conversion fun. Now we get to discuss how SEO can get in on the game.
There are two ways SEO and CRO should work together. The first is easily explained in one line by Tim Eschenauer of Austin & Williams in his most recent SEO blog post, “I say stop focusing on rankings and start focusing on conversions.” Basically, you can rank first for all of your most relevant terms, but if you can’t get the conversion it doesn’t matter. This is a perfect example of how SEO and CRO must work together; SEO gets you the traffic and CRO converts the traffic into business.
The second way SEO and CRO should work together involves landing pages.
In most cases you’re going to be setting up landing pages for your ad campaigns; however, that doesn’t mean relevant organic traffic should be kept out. Your main business objective is to get as many conversions as possible, and if you’re doing SEO on your landing pages correctly, this traffic should be just as relevant as your campaign traffic. Just be sure to keep data on the two separate in your analytics as they may behave differently once they land.
The only times when it wouldn’t be a good idea to send organic traffic to your landing pages is when you’re promoting “limited-time offers—or offers applicable only to a specific segment of your audience” says Scott Brinker, ion’s president and CTO. Otherwise, get your long-term landing pages indexed as quickly as possible.
So, how do you make SEO-driven landing pages? Much like you would create any SEO web page. Christine Laudebnstein, a marketing copywriter at Wordstream says making sure your landing pages are keyword rich is important:
This is also crucial for ranking high in natural search engine results. When your keywords appear in key fields like the page’s headline, subheads, and main content, it’s more likely that the landing page will show up when those keywords are searched. You can also put keywords in picture captions, calls to action, and meta tags. Of course, it’s important not to overstuff your page with keywords, as the repetition could annoy readers and appear spammy, undermining your SEO efforts.
While CRO and SEO have developed into two separate industries, they have the same purpose in mind: connect traffic with relevant content.
In the next (and last) part of our Creating Effective Landing Pages series we’ll answer the question, “just how many landing pages should I have?”