Whether it's simply your home page, or a series of specialized destination pages, having effective landing pages is one of the key elements of an affordable local SEO strategy.
If you are a local business, or even an online business with a local, geographic focus, you don't need to be found by the entire world on the Internet. You simply need to be found locally.
Getting hundreds or even thousands of website visits from folks in Derby, England Asmara, Eritrea might be interesting, but they are quite unlikely to become customers for your localized business.
The ultimate and overriding goal for any local business website is to be found by local prospects - people near you that need or want your product or service. While this sounds painfully obvious and simple, it can be an amazingly complex process to get someone who is searching online for a business like yours to find your website.
We've all heard the statistics: if your site doesn't show up on the first page of the search engine results you will probably not be seen. Ever. If you do happen to make it to page one, but are not in the top three positions, your odds of even being considered are still slim.
If you are fortunate enough to be one of only a select handful of similar businesses in your area, it can be easier. For example, how many hot air balloon ride companies can there be in a town of only 50,000 people?
If, on the other hand, you are simply one of dozens or even hundreds of similar businesses in a heavily populated area, then it becomes exponentially more difficult to be found organically.
Affordable Local SEO Depends on Organic Search and Landing Pages
Being found organically simply means being found online by someone searching for a business like yours on a search engine such as Google or Bing. This is not the same as someone clicking on a paid ad (such as Google AdWords) or by typing in your business name or URL.
The purpose of SEO is simply to increase the likelihood of your website being found by prospects using a search engine. But being found is just the beginning. People have to like what they see once they've clicked on your link in the search results. And this relies on a number of tools at your disposal.
One of the tools, if you will, for making this happen is a landing page. What is a landing page? A great explanation was provided by Moz a few years back:
A Landing Page is a page that focuses information targeted towards a particular user – and according to Seth Godin, optimised specifically to encourage 1 of 5 actions:
1. Get a visitor to click (to go to another page, on your site or someone else's)
2. Get a visitor to buy
3. Get a visitor to give permission for you to follow up (by email, phone, etc.). This includes registration of course.
4. Get a visitor to tell a friend
5. Get a visitor to learn something, which could even include posting a comment or giving you some sort of feedback
One Landing Page is OK; Multiple Landing Pages are Better
Many websites will have only one “landing page” and that is typically their home page. While this is important, the potential for utilizing true landing pages is far larger than that. For example, a cosmetic surgeon might simply have one page on the practice website that lists the procedures and services offered.
A better approach, from an SEO perspective, would be to create a separate page for each procedure. Each of those pages would have key words in their headers and a healthy amount of niche-specific content about both the procedure and the practice.
If a surgery practice had, say, five specific procedures that they could highlight with their own pages, then there are at least five more destinations that could be “found” with organic searches. Thus, the beauty of landing pages for SEO!
According to a post at Wishpond.com
Studies have shown that business websites with 10-15 landing pages tend to increase conversions by 55% over business websites with less than 10 landing pages. And those with more than 40 landing pages increase conversions by over 500%.
Make Your Landing Pages Part of the Family
For SEO purposes, you do not want your landing pages to exist alone outside of your website. These are commonly referred to as “orphan” pages. Instead, you want them to be on your website sot that you can set them up to serve as major navigational links across your website. This allows you to increase the efficiency of targeting relevant keywords and increases the likelihood of getting conversions from visitors.
A word about conversions: in "SEO-speak" this often refers to one of the five actions mentioned in Seth Godin's quote. And, while it may mean making a sale through your website’s landing page, far more often it means succeeding in having someone interact with your website.
On a plastic surgeon's website, for example, this could be someone filling out a patient registration form, requesting an appointment online, or calling the practice with their smartphone.
What Makes for an Effective Landing Page?
There are three basic elements for a solid landing page:
- Content
- Links
- Tracking
Content should be relevant and truly readable. The days of simply stuffing key words into some superficial descriptions are long gone and will hurt rather than help your efforts. While you are creating content to be crawled, indexed and ranked by search engines, Google especially is looking for content that is relevant and has suitable context.
Links. There is ongoing debate in the upper echelons of "SEO-gurudom" regarding the value and importance of links- both incoming and outgoing - but suffice it to say that links to other pages throughout your website are critical. Having outbound links to quality sites is also important.
Tracking simply refers to staying apprised of each page’s performance by way of your website’s analytics. According to Moz, when you know that visitors first come to your site through one of your landing pages, you know it was a direct result of your targeted SEO strategy.
With these elements firmly established you can attract visitors and track their behavior as well as the performance of each page. This data will allow you to make tweaks and modifications as required. What often occurs is getting insights into what keywords perform better than others, and which products, services or specialties attract the most searches. As a result of this information you can improve upon your earlier efforts.
Find Help With Affordable Local SEO Marketing
A well-built local SEO strategy can be an effective way to boost your business. But achieving your marketing objectives using a content-based strategy does take time and it won't happen with a few blog posts or other great content.
The reality of SEO is that people will typically see your content for a while before they engage with you.
The good news is that you don't have to figure all this out alone. In fact, one of the best investments you can make with your marketing budget is to partner with a solid firm like Petaluma-based BroadVision Marketing. We are your local partner for your local marketing needs.
Click on the button below to learn more about affordable local SEO marketing so you can make an informed decision, or call BroadVision Marketing at 707-799-1238.
