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Landing Pages for SEO - Stop the Insanity!
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Landing pages are one of the most important ideas for both effective SEO and PPC / AdWords advertising. Yet there is a lot of confusion about what is a Landing Page. To make matters worse, there are competing definitions of landing pages and big differences in strategy between landing pages for SEO and landing pages for PPC. Here is a blog explanation.
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By Jason McDonald
Senior SEO Instructor - JM Internet Group.
Posted: February 19, 2010
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Contents:
Landing on your Site vs. Landing Pages
Many of my students get confused over landing pages. Can't any page on your website be a landing page?, they ask. Or what is the difference between a doorway page, and a landing page? Or, what is the difference between an SEO landing page and a PPC / AdWords landing page? Or, I see in Google Analytics that it identifies my top landing pages, isn't this enough?
I always was a fan of Susan Powter, and her dieting phrase, Stop the Insanity!. SEO is a lot like getting physically fit, and this field has its share of insanity just as the dieting business does. One of the biggest sources of insanity is term confusion, wherein different authors and SEO guru's use the same terms to mean things which are quite distinct at a conceptual level. Just as with dieting and physical fitness, clear thinking is a first step - so with SEO and getting to the top of Google, one must think clearly.
Conceptually, here are the distinctions:
- A web surfer can indeed land on any page on your website. This is the definition used by Google in Google Analytics.
- You can conceptually define a landing page for SEO purposes as a page specifically designed to capture traffic for a specific long-tail search.
- You can conceptually define a PPC landing page as a page specifically designed to allow surfer to land there from an AdWords or PPC advertising campaign
So my stock phrase is:
A surfer might land on any page on your website, but that does not make it a landing page!
For our purposes a landing page is either a) an SEO page that you create for a specific search, or b) a PPC / AdWords page that you define as the first place they land after clicking on an ad. There are thus two basic types of landing pages (LPs): SEO LP's and PPC LP's.
SEO vs. PPC Landing Pages
OK, leaving aside the Google Analytics definition, we have these two basic divisions. SEO LP's and PPC LP's. What are the conceptual differences here? First and foremost, we are designing our SEO landing pages to attract traffic from Google, Bing, and Yahoo. We want them to be discovered! We have specifically designed them using good SEO techniques such as embedding the target keywords in the TITLE tag, using the H1 / H2 family as well as A HREF and other page tags technique to weave the target keywords into the text. And, if possible, we have added a link-building and news strategy to bring traffic to these SEO landing pages.
Our PPC / AdWords landing pages, in contrast, are not meant to 'attract traffic.' They are meant to respond to clicks from Google that we are paying for. For metrics purposes, therefore we want a clean data path: we do NOT want non-paid traffic to contaminate our traffic to these pages, and thereby confuse our metrics. If we get 100 people landing on our PPC landing page, we want to be sure that all 100 came from our paid advertising, so as not to confuse our metrics and think that our ads are performing better than they actually are.
Hence:
SEO Landing Page Purpose: attract web traffic
PPC Landing Page Purpose: respond to incoming advertising clicks
What are the implications? We promote the two types of landing pages quite differently -
- SEO Landing pages: index them via the site map, and link to them from the home page and other pages on the site. Make them very public!
- PPC Landing pages: hide them by excluding them from Google via robots.txt and NOT linking to them from anywhere on the website. Make them very private!
Landing Pages - Best Practices for Both SEO and PPC Landing Pages
Beyond that promotional dissimilarity, however, SEO landing pages and PPC landing pages do have a structural goal in common: getting incoming web surfers to do something, perform an action or goal, such as filling out a registration for an email eLetter, a no-cost evaluation / consultation, webinar, etc., and/or purchasing a product.
Landing page structural best practices follow the pattern of:
- Confirm - confirm the search, by repeating the target keyword in the top left corner of the page.
- Engage - engage the surfer in the middle of the page by explaining your product or service in a friendly, effective sales oriented way, and using effective graphics to get him or her excited about what you have to offer.
- Act - have an action desired, such as a registration or purchase, usually located in the bottom right of the page.
All three of these components should be visible 'above the fold' of the page. Good landing page design leads to effective conversions.
Hopefully this blog posts responds to the insanity out there about landing pages, and clears some of it up. Happy SEO Fitness!
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