How to SEO Optimize a Landing Page

No matter how great your landing pages are, they can't funnel prospects toward a sale if the right people don't see it.

High traffic to these pages doesn't matter either if people just stumble onto them and bounce because they're not qualified buyers.

That's why it's so important to SEO optimize them — to get them in front of the right people at the right time.

We'll show you how to optimize your landing pages and why it's so important that you interlink them with content pages.

What is SEO for Landing Pages?

Landing pages aim to push prospects down the funnel and turn them into buyers. They do this through a combination of useful (and user-friendly) design and compelling CTAs.

For example, look at this landing page for Petal.com. You know what they offer within seconds, and they have a CTA with a clear next step to apply.

Optimizing pages for SEO makes them more discoverable and by the right people for two reasons:

1. You're targeting keywords your target ICP is looking for. You're answering search intent and bringing qualified traffic to your site
2. Clean site structure makes for a better UX, and easier for search engines to crawl and index your content

All of the above contribute to higher rankings on the SERP, which means more awareness, higher qualified search traffic, and more conversions.

10 Steps to Optimizing Your Landing Pages for SEO

1. Target Bottom-of-Funnel Keywords

Landing pages aim to convert prospects to buyers, so you need to focus your keyword research on transactional, bottom-of-funnel keywords that can drive real business.

Use in-depth keyword research tools like Semrush and Ahrefs and filter your search by intent. Don't forget about possibly targeting secondary or semantic keywords that support the primary keyword for better targeting.

A caveat, though: search data can be wrong. We've targeted keywords that show zero volume or N/A on Semrush but have actually brought in qualified traffic, clicks, and even demo bookings. So don't ignore zero search volume keywords.

Other, more customer-centric places to find keywords are:

• from sales calls. You can actually use Letterdrop to automatically pull product questions, themes, and objections from them
• from your sales and customer support teams
• online communities where your ICP hangs out, like LinkedIn and Reddit

2. Structure Pages Around Transactional Intent

As mentioned above, landing page search intent is usually transactional.

You need to structure your pages around what your prospect wants and needs to see for them even to consider taking the next step with your business.

Things to consider include:

• Compelling CTAs
• Relevant images and screengrabs
• Short, concise copy that's clear on what your products can do and what the benefits are

It's important to note here that landing pages aren't always the best way of answering search intent if it's anything other than transactional. More on that later.

‎3. Optimize Meta Information

Your landing pages must be structured so search engines can easily read, understand, and index them. Otherwise, they'll be bumped down the rankings and lost.

Optimize your title and meta description to:

• Be concise. Your title needs to be less than x characters and your description less than x characters, or they'll be cut off on Google. This is terrible for UX and looks unprofessional
• Naturally include the target keyword(s.) Remember that you're writing for people, not bots, so don't stuff your keywords. See if you can include it or related keywords while still providing value to a reader.

4. Create Clean URLs

Your URL reflects your site structure and how your landing page fits into the bigger picture. This is important for both prospects and Google when it comes to understanding your site.

For example, a URL could feed into a larger content cluster or content pillar. That's why it's important to publish pages to your own domain.

Here are some best practices:

• Keep your URL between 50 and 60 characters max
• Your landing page title should ideally be 5 words
• Use hyphens to separate words
• Use lower case

An example structure is yourdomain.com/blog/seo-optimize-landing-pages

5. Optimize Images and Video

Google hasn't reached a point yet where it can understand your images and videos, which is why it's so important for indexing that you add alt text. It also helps prospects with accessibility issues to understand your pages.

Adding different media to your pages also boosts rankings with Google's Perspectives, especially if they're properly optimized to show they're relevant and helpful.

For this reason, try and naturally include your keyword in the file name, caption, and alt text.

6. Use Proper Heading Structure

Structuring your article with headings like H1, H2, H3 etc, gives you a cleaner page structure and a better reading experience overall.

As above, include your keywords and secondary keywords only where it makes sense.

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7. Optimize Your Core Web Vitals

Your page speed and Core Web Vitals have a huge influence on SEO. Your prospects are likely to bounce if there are slow loading speeds, which can hurt your rankings.

Here are best practices for speeding up your website:

1. If you're comfortable with code, use Preconnect Commands to Speed Up Font and Image Load Times. Custom font and images have quite the impact on loading times since your site has to retrieve files. Instead of adjusting them manually, you can use the following code:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://assets.website-files.com/" />
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://global-assets.website-files.com" />
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com" />
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" />

2. Optimize Your CSS, JS, and HTML by minifying them in your website settings. Site-builders like Webflow let you do this. This means removing unnecessary characters from the source code to dramatically increase loading speeds.

‎‎3. Monitor Any Third-Party Scripts. Limiting third-party scripts down to what you need will allow you to get the important things loaded first and speed up general loading time.Limit the number of third-party scripts to what you need.

• Consider delaying, deferring, or loading scripts asynchronously for faster loading times.
• Selectively load different scripts for mobile and desktop users.

4. Manage your Image Files. Images are often the largest files on a page and have long load times.

• Optimize your images by using responsive images and file formats like WebP.
• Compress your image files to make them faster to load.

5. Set Attribute ‎Dimensions to Your Images and Videos.

• If you don't set dimensions for images and video, the user's browser will have to wait until it loads the image before it can render the page, which may cause sudden jumps or shifts.
• Here's a code example of how to set specific dimensions for your images:

<img src="http://letterdropimagecodesample.com" width="120" height="100" alt="image alt text">

6. Accept Suggestions from ‎Pa‎geSpeed Insights

Google's PageSpeed Insights tool provides feedback on your FID (First Input Delay) score. So it's a good idea to take note of its recommendations to improve your page's performance metrics.

‎7. Monitor Your Animations. Evaluate if animations impact above-the-fold loading times and adjust accordingly.

• Consider removing unnecessary animations to serve content faster.
• Only keep animations that are essential for enhancing the user experience.

8. Optimize for Mobile

Studies show that over 55% of web traffic comes from mobile devices — and with Google having rolled out its mobile-first indexing a while ago, it's never been more important to make your website mobile-friendly.

Test your website on different devices and in different resolutions to find the best fit for mobile browsing.

9. Build Internal Links and Backlinks

Internal links are incredibly important in helping Google (and users) understand the structure of your site and which pages are relevant or helpful to a search.

Add and manage your internal links without overdoing it on your landing pages — remember that your ultimate goal with them is to convert, not send them all over your website.

Backlinks are also important since they're votes of confidence from other reputable sites and help with domain authority. Don't think about trying to buy them (Google's Link Spam update will penalize you), but get them legitimately through:

• PR efforts
• Co-marketing with other businesses
• Asking for guest posts
• Writing for reputable sites like Medium
• Answering questions with sites like AskAB2BWriter and HARO

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10. Track Performance and Make SEO Improvements

SEO is all about housekeeping and playing the long game. If you let your efforts slide, so will the ranking capability of your pages.

Use Google Search Console and Google Analytics to track and refresh / fix pages that:

• Used to drive traffic but no longer do
• Rank low for more than one unrelated keyword — this is fixed by splitting the page into multiple.
• Have high engagement but low traffic — this is often a distribution issue.
• Are almost ranking — a couple of technical fixes could bump you up the rankings.
• Are multiple pages ranking for the same keyword — this is keyword cannibalization, which is fixable by combining pages

For a more in-depth breakdown and what to do for each scenario, check out our guide on content refreshes.

Landing Page SEO vs Content SEO

It's safe to say that landing page SEO and the 'standard' content SEO are a little different:

• Landing page SEO is mainly technical and refers to cleaning up your site structure to become more visible on the SERPs. They're built to get people to buy something.
• Content SEO is also technical, but also more topical — content pages are arguably better at answering search intent. Most of the time, content pages rank better (and are suited better) for SEO than a landing page. They're better at equipping a searcher with all the information they need to end their search journey, which is, after all, what SEO is about.

But this doesn't mean you shouldn't optimize your landing pages. They must be visible to get prospects through the door to buying, and they're great for running ads against.

So, how do you know which of the two — landing or content pages — you should be using for your specific prospects' search intent?

There's actually a feature in Letterdrop that can tell you search intent and whether a landing page (or any other form of content) is better suited to answering that intent.

Use Both Landing Pages and Content Pages for Maximum Lift

Landing pages offer about 10% lift, while content pages offer 80% lift, which is why you need to create and optimize both. Use them together to close more deals, faster.

Here's how:

1. Create pillar pages on a certain topic or offering. Create articles targeting long-tail keywords around this pillar to answer search intent.
   1. For example, we bring Webflow to parity with WordPress for our users at Letterdrop. We have multiple articles on this pillar on our blog.
2. Make sure to interlink all of these related content pages with internal links.
3. Link out to relevant conversion pages, which are your landing pages, from these articles. Use compelling CTAs.

Now, your long-tail keyword gets traffic to content pages. From there, prospects are directed to your landing pages. From there, and using CTAs, they convert.

Get Your Landing Pages Seen By the Right People with SEO

Your landing page is great — get it in front of qualified prospects with proper SEO practices.

At Letterdrop, we're constantly developing our SEO tooling to put people first. Let our tools take care of on-page and post-publish SEO for you.