Starting to optimize your landing page for search engines can be a very difficult task. If your pages are already built, it can be even more difficult. I like to think of SEO as the foundation for a good solid house. It is the basic support you build off of when creating good page. If your landing page is not relevant to what your customers may be searching for online, your page will not rank high organically. Plain and simple, not only does your landing page have to be relevant to your customers, but it also has to be relevant to the search engines. Below, I will outline some ways to help you get started with keyword research and content optimization.
1. Start with a keyword strategy for your particular landing page. What is the primary theme surrounding your landing page? For example, if you our landing page is about eating healthy, your keyword strategy would be “eating healthy.”
2. Research keywords using your keyword strategy. This step is crucial to the success of you’re your campaign. Why? In some cases the terms that are branded well in house are not the terms your potential customers would be searching for. For example, your company has a new product that has been deemed a “greener” solution for the environment. Green pest control. Well that is fantastic so on your website you build a landing page that talks all about this new “green” product that is safe yet effective. However, you then perform some keyword research and find out that “green” is not what customers are searching for. They are searching the term “natural” pest control, which means they will never find you site.
3. Once a key phrase strategy is identified it is important to perform keyword research prior to developing site content. There are a number of free keyword research tools on the web. Click here and try Google’s free keyword research tool to help you get started. For the sake of this conversation, I used Google’s Keyword research tool for the phrase “eat healthy” which resulted in over 100 key phrases searched. The top five heavily search keyphrases identified were: “what is eating healthy”, “healthy eating”, “what is healthy eating”, “healthy eating”, “why healthy eating”, “about eating healthy.” These are some of the phrases you want to incorporate into your landing page. These could be the five headers on your page, meaning each one wrapped inside an <h> tag. I’ll save tags for another day, but I think you get the gist.
4. Using your identified keyword phrases and or keywords, now you can write the content of your landing page. The more these phrases come up in the body of your page, the more relevant and creditable search engines will identify your page. A good rule of thumb is to write natural copy, focused on one subject, using singular, plural, similar (in meaning) and related (associated with) keywords. Try not to jumble your page with too many topics. Always keep in mind the keyword / key phrase strategy of your page.
5. Place primary keywords phrases and or keywords into:
- Page title tag
- Description tag
- Headlines
- Sub-headlines
- Internal outbound links (to other pages on your site)
- External outbound links (to other sites)
- Image names and alt tags
- Internal inbound links from related pages and your home page
- External inbound links from other sites
It doesn’t take much to improve the relevancy of your landing page and help build more credibility within the search engines. What did I outline for you, five basic steps? If you apply these basic building blocks each time you create a landing page, your organic ranking within the search engines will improve.