Optimize landing pages for SEO
Optimize landing pages for SEO
1. Create a spreadsheet with a list of search phrases that describe what you would search for if you were looking for your landing page's topic.
Ask your marketing, sales, and customer success teams to contribute to the spreadsheet. Include any search phrases which you get from Google Search Console that apply to the landing page. Add suggestions from a keyword research tool such as Ahrefs or Google Ads Keyword Planner.
2. Enter the keywords into an SEO tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs to get the search volume information and keyword difficulty.
Substantial search volume differs in every industry and location. For some, 1000 search volume is high, for others it’s too low. Find out your product or service’s search volume. Whatever you get is the high search volume for your industry and location. If your product has 1000 search volume and your landing page topic is 500, that’s good. Only target keywords that are relatively easy to rank on and have the highest keyword volume. Use Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner to get search data.
3. Analyze the first five ranking results on search engines to understand the type of pages that are ranking for your focus keyword.
For example, if they are category pages and not landing pages, it is unlikely you will rank high with a landing page.
4. Make a list of possible questions that website visitors might have when they get on your landing page.
Include all the whats, whys, and hows around your product or service. For example, visitors to a product landing page might need to know what the features of the product are and why they should buy from you. Check competing landing pages for questions that they answer and add to your list.
5. Write your landing page copy using the questions you have gathered, your focus keywords, variations of the keywords, and related or semantic words to optimize.
Answer all the questions you have gathered in your copy. Use your focus keyword in your H1, ALT tag, meta title, and body text of your landing page. Make sure you are using keywords naturally in the copy. Use variations of your keywords and related words where possible in your landing page copy.
6. Reach out to bloggers and other non-competing websites to publish guest blog posts and add a link to your landing page in them.
To find such blogs and websites, Google a keyword plus guest blog, guest post, or write for us. The keyword can be your niche or landing page topic. If your landing page is about marketing, then your search phrase would be marketing guest post. If you have access to an SEO tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush, you can use them to find backlink opportunities as well.
7. Use an SEO tool to discover the websites that link to your competitors and pitch a guest post, or a link in an existing post.
For a link in an existing post: Look through their existing content to see if there’s a mention of the product that your landing page features which does not include a link. Look for links to your competitors and offer an incentive to the site owner to swap you out. Look for broken links that could be replaced with your content.
8. Run your landing page through Google PageSpeed Insights to see any issues that affect your page's speed.
Reach out to a web developer to resolve any issues highlighted by the tool.