While website landing pages offer a considerable benefit for paid media campaigns, they also support organic search efforts in a great many ways. Paid search (pay-per-click, Google AdWords, paid social media) leverages online advertising platforms to target your advertising to an intended audience. Organic search strategies leverage audience interests via search engines (in most cases) to achieve the same goal.
When a website is optimized for a specific industry, say construction for instance, its home page typically focuses on a single keyword. So an SEO strategy that is comprehensive would include a campaign to target a host of keywords that fall under the service offerings of that firm. Without that diversity, many of the searches the website should show up for would simply serve as missed opportunities.
When someone in Minneapolis searches for a contractor, for instance, they might search for “Minneapolis+Home+Builder” or perhaps “Minneapolis+Kitchen+Remodeler” or “Deck+Construction+Firm+Near+Me.” If your website is tuned only to a single, more general keyword within the industry, it will miss any chance at visibility for a majority of these more granular searches.
The problem is a single web page is limited to visibility for a single search term and its variants (or synonyms). A website’s home page has the greatest potency among all of its other pages for search indexing, and so SEO managers typically reserve the most important search term for that page. That’s where landing pages come into play.
Landing pages offer a second, third and even fourth bite of the keyword search apple. One of the most potent search strategies SEO managers use today is to create a web page with the keyword they are targeting in the page’s URL. Landing pages offer the ability to dedicate a single page to any keyword by adding that keyword to the URL (i.e., domainname/keyword). So for the same construction firm, it’s easy to create a new landing page for each of the service areas they wish to target.
In the above scenario, you would create a landing page for “Minneapolis+Deck+Builder” or “Kitchen+Remodeling+Minneapolis” or “Home+Renovation+Contractor” or all three (or more) and target all of the keywords you’re looking to gain visibility for locally.
The best part is you don’t have to clutter up your website with each and every landing page you create while building this potent search strategy. None of these pages needs to be accessible via the website menu or even navigable throughout the website’s front end (from links on the website). Each page needs only to be added to your website’s sitemap to ensure it is indexed, and you get the potency of several “mini-home pages” for each search term you’re looking to target. As a matter of fact, it’s best if you don’t add links to the landing pages on your website’s front end. After all, the entry point for these pages should be the direct links to them via Google Search once they become indexed not your website’s menu. The purpose they serve is to bring traffic to your website, not to provide an additional resource to those already there.
You can think of landing pages as you would a rose bush. The rose bush with the greatest amount of flowers attracts a larger amount of bees. It’s as simple as that. If you have a larger number of search terms you want to target on Google, Yahoo and Bing, landing pages are great resources for doing just that.
Just ensure your content is not duplicated on any of those pages. Each page should have distinct language that targets your desired keyword appropriately without duplication. Duplicated content is a huge no-no for Google. Your site could get penalized for that infraction.
If you would like to learn more about how landing pages can support your brand’s sales, contact Proctor Digital’s team of SEO managers at 773.664.5819. We love building brand visibility for our clients.