How to Build & Optimize your Landing Pages for SEO

Landing pages are created with one goal—to compel users to perform an action in response to a marketing message or call-to-action (CTA). The action can be anything from making a purchase to subscribing to your mailing list. But all successful landing pages should motivate users to carry out some type of task.

SEO landing pages have one extra goal—to rank high on search engine results pages (SERP) for relevant keywords.

Why should you optimize your landing pages for SEO? 

Landing pages and marketing go hand in hand, but for a long time, marketers have considered landing pages as short-term or seasonal marketing tools that have no purpose after the particular campaign ends. SEO landing pages give marketers the opportunity to get the best of both worlds: relevant organic traffic from SEO and higher conversion rates with a solid landing page design.

SEO landing page vs PPC landing page 

Traditionally, landing pages have been used in pay-per-click (PPC) and email marketing campaigns to reach a target audience. But with search engine optimization, it is possible to attract relevant and organic web traffic to your landing pages without launching expensive campaigns.

Major differences between SEO landing pages and PPC landing pages include the method used to attract visitors, and which stage of the buying cycle those visitors have reached. When a landing page ranks for a particular keyword, it attracts a wide range of people from the awareness stage to the purchasing stage. But when landing pages are used in social media/PPC campaigns, they generally bring in users who are ready to make a conversion.

This is why PPC landing pages rely on a single CTA to create a distraction-free, conversion-focused experience for the user. You do not need to use keywords in PPC content.

On the contrary, SEO landing pages feature multiple internal links, backlinks, CTAs, and relevant keywords to rank for popular search keywords. Many businesses use SEO pages to inform users, improve brand recognition, and then direct the audience to their conversion-oriented PPC landing pages.

While SEO landing pages need to have a low bounce rate to rank higher on SERP, PPC landing pages can have higher bounce rates, as long as they also have a high conversion rate.

Optimize your seasonal landing pages

Marketers create multiple landing pages for every campaign. Once a seasonal campaign ends, the landing pages are removed. When the campaign has to be run again the next year, the landing pages are created from scratch. But if you create SEO landing pages with relevant keywords for your seasonal campaigns, they can be un-linked from the navigation when the campaign ends and reused every year.

The SEO potential of landing pages increases with time. If you look at any of the top-ranked pages in SERP, they are mostly old pages that are consistently updated to stay relevant. Old web pages gather quality backlinks over the course of time, which plays a role in their high rankings.

With search engine optimization, you can build high-converting landing pages that run on organic traffic instead of starting from scratch every time.

When to use SEO for landing pages? 

Not every landing page is meant to be optimized for search engines. SEO is a time-consuming process that may not be well suited to short-term campaigns where competition is intense and results have to be instant.

But SEO landing pages are well worth the time and effort under the right circumstances. They help reduce the marketing expenditure of long-term or periodical landing page campaigns and consistently bring in relevant, organic traffic.

Start building SEO-friendly landing pages today 

Creating SEO-friendly landing pages may appear like a lot of work but landing pages can be converted into a goldmine of organic traffic and conversions with consistent effort.

SEO insights, the built-in SEO assistant for Zoho LandingPage is now live as a beta feature.  With this handy feature by their side, users can instantly evaluate their landing pages for SEO potential and get an actionable checklist for SEO optimizing their pages.