Landing pages — especially product pages — are usually designed for paid marketing campaigns. The idea is to spend hundreds and even thousands of pounds in PPC campaigns and social media advertising to drive traffic to these product landing pages.
Although it is a good idea to spend money on paid marketing campaigns to drive traffic to a landing page that is expected to convert well, it is not always a sustainable solution for long-term growth. Ideally, you want free organic traffic to come in on a consistent basis and convert on your web page. Achieving this frees up your marketing budget to run different experiments or to invest in new products and landing pages.
In this blog post, we discuss ways for optimising product landing pages for search and making them more search engine friendly.
1. Basic on-page optimisation
On-page search engine optimisation is perhaps the most important part of making a web page more search engine friendly. When it comes to optimising a web page for search, you can take the following steps:
- Publish the landing page with a custom URL that is descriptive, short, and keyword rich.
- Get the meta title right. The meta title should be unique, interesting, and it should also contain the primary keyword you are trying to optimise for.
- The meta description gives an excellent opportunity to include multiple primary and LSI keywords. The meta description must not exceed 320 characters, and it should be captivating and descriptive enough to encourage more readers to click on your web page
2. Keyword research
As product landing pages are about specific products and features with already established names, it is common to forget about keyword research and implementation. However, to optimise landing pages for search, you should conduct thorough keyword research and identify multiple keywords that you can include.
Here is a simple strategy to implement.
Shortlist a few keywords that are relevant to the content of your landing page. Identify the variations of those keywords with a reasonable search volume and level of competition. Then try to include those keywords in the copy of your web page as naturally and contextually as possible.
Most importantly, make sure the keywords you select accurately represent the search intent of your target audience and potential website visitors.
Here are a few places to include your keywords:
- The URL of the landing page
- The main title (H1 heading)
- The subheadings (H2 and H3 tags)
- The meta description of the landing page
- Image file names and alt text
3. Long-tail keywords for a higher conversion rate
When you conduct keyword research, you will often notice that a lot of the keywords have high search volume and very tough competition. The solution is to find relevant long-tail keywords that you can include on your landing page.
Long-tail keywords are keyword phrases with usually more than 3 words. They generally have lower search volume, but they also have lower competition. This makes them easier to rank for.
More importantly, long-tail keywords represent the user search intent better, and they also have a relatively higher conversion rate — making them perfect for product landing pages.
4. Direct backlinks to your landing pages
On-page SEO is only one part of the puzzle. To gain and sustain higher rankings in the SERPs, you will also have to obtain plenty of high-quality backlinks for your landing pages.
The backlinks you acquire should fulfil the following criteria:
- They must come from well-established and reputed websites that don’t follow any black hat SEO practices.
- The links must come from a relevant website in your niche.
Targeted outreach is a good way to secure these backlinks, but that can be tough with product landing pages. In case the manual outreach strategy doesn’t work, try guest-blogging, in which you can contextually promote your landing page and create a link with an anchor text of your choice.
5. Engagement metrics
If your landing page has poor engagement metrics, you will likely face a tough time in the SERPs. These engagement metrics include: click-through rate, average page on time, dwell time, bounce rate, and website loading speed.
- You can improve the click-through rate by writing engaging titles and descriptions.
- Average page on time can be improved by creating useful, interesting, and informative content.
- Dwell time refers to the time a user spends on a website before going back to the search engine results page. You can improve that by making a great first impression. The meta title and description also play an important role in setting the right expectations for users, so they don’t bounce off the page soon after landing on it.
- Bounce rate is a trickier metric for landing pages. Bounce rate improves when users click on links that take them to different pages on the website, but that defeats the purpose of landing pages that focus on a single CTA. Depending on your goal, you will have to balance bounce rate with the conversion rate.
- Website loading speed is arguably the most important metric here.
As we mentioned earlier, there is no need for you to rely solely on paid traffic for your landing pages. Follow the tips mentioned in this article to make your product landing pages for SEO friendly and give them a better chance to rank higher in the SERPs.