by Jeremy Dearringer
Do you feel like you’ve reached a glass ceiling with regards to the number of competitive keywords you can get your homepage to rank for? Is it possible that traffic from some of your competitive keyword phrases might not convert well if your homepage is the first thing that website visitor sees? If so, you may be ready to create more specific landing pages to increase conversion rates and target a wider range of competitive keyword phrases.
Your landing pages should get as much attention to detail as your homepage. You may want to consult a conversion rate expert when designing and testing these landing pages. I recommend James Paden from Vibrant Solutions or the Conversion Rate Experts out of the UK. For the sake of this blog post I am going to provide a check list for SEO and not specific conversion rate strategies.
Insure that your landing page contains the following as they relate to your targeted keywords phrases.
- Create a compelling page title with exact matches of your targeted keyword phrases. This page title should not exceed 68 characters. This character limit may vary and many experts recommend no more than 70, but I have found that I always end up with a nice, clean page title if I do not exceed 68 characters. I also recommend mentioning your brand. The following page title is a good example. “Pool Tables & Billiards Tables for Sale | Family Leisure<!–“
- Add a meta description tag containing exact keyword phrase matches, benefits and a call to action. CTR (click through rates) have an impact on search engine rankings. By creating compelling page titles and meta descriptions you may be able to increase your CTRs.
- Add a minimum of one image per targeted keyword phrase to contain alternative image text of that keyword phrase. Consider how well you are communicating to your target market if you do not have imagery on you landing page that would be appropriate for keywords you are targeting for SEO or PPC.
- Image file names should also represent your targeted keyword phrases. For example if you were targeting the keyword phrase “landing page optimization” you may have an image named landing-page-optimization.jpg
- Create primary H1 and secondary H2 tags to contain you exact keyword phrases and/or derivative keyword phrases of your targeted phrases.
- Your landing page should also include between 200 and 1000 words of body content mentioning each targeted keyword phrase at least two or three times. Only mention your targeted keyword phrase more than three times if it makes sense when writing naturally. Don’t force it. In addition to mentioning your targeted keyword phrases you should also try to use co-occurrence terms and synonyms of your targeted keyword phrases. These are words that search engines like Google and Bing may expect to see within content relating to your targeted keyword phrases.
- Link to your landing page(s) directly from the homepage, blog posts and other related pages on your website. Use the anchor text of your most competitive keyword phrase that you want this landing page to rank for.
- As with any page, your landing pages should be included in your XML sitemap.
- Once you covered these bases with regards to landing page optimization SEO, you will need to find other relevant websites and find ways to get them to link to your landing page. If you find yourself not ranking for your keyword phrases after all of this you are probably lacking enough quality in-bound links to be competitive. Slingshot SEO can help you overcome this obstacle.
There you have it. My landing page optimization checklist for SEO. Good luck.