How to Make Google Fall In Love With Your Landing Pages

Traffic volumes will make or break your landing page’s performance. Yes, your content needs to be 100% focused on your campaign objective. And yes, you’ll need an incredible value proposal and call to action. But no traffic spells no conversions. Period.

So whenever you create a landing page, put to work these best practices:

Meta matters!

Correctly tagged, your meta title and description are key to your landing page’s search performance. Google and other search engines use these to create the snippets that appear in listings when you do a search. Optimize your meta title and description and you maximize the ability of your landing page to be found and to grab people’s attention.

Title challenges

• In its search results, Google shows up to 70 characters (including spaces) of a page's title.
• If a page title exceeds 70 characters, a Google search result displays as many whole words as it can, with the rest replaced by an ellipsis (...).

Description deciders

• Google shows up to 156 characters (including spaces) of a landing page's meta description.
• If a page's meta description exceeds 156 characters, a Google search result displays as many whole words as it can, with the rest replaced by an ellipsis (...).
• If your page has a publication date, Google may include this as part of its snippet character count. In this case, you’ll only have up to 139 or 140 characters (depending on whether the publication date is a single or double-digit day of the month) net to play with.

Also ensure your meta-descriptions:

• Incorporate relevant keywords and key phrases.
• Include your product benefits and value proposal.
• Finish with a clear call to action, to help maximize click through.

Get ahead with headers

Years ago, keyword density was crucial to deciding a web page’s ranking. But today, other factors also need considering. One of the most important is header tags. These enable you to organize your landing page content so the visibility of a message relates directly to its importance.

• H1 Apply this tag to your page’s main headline. Here you want to show what the page is about, and also include relevant keywords. Copy must be friendly to both people and search-engine robots.
• H2 Use this sub-headings tag for messages of secondary importance in your hierarchy.
• H3 If there such a thing as sub-subheadings, this is the tag you’d apply to them. Ideal for messages of third ranking importance.
• H4, H5 and H6 Using the same principles as above, apply these tags according to the diminishing importance of the messages concerned.

For example, if your landing page is about ‘Mediterranean Food’ your header-tag structure could be something like:

H1: Best Mediterranean Food Ever
H2: Amazing stuffed tuna galets
H3: Stuffed tuna galets recipe

Header-tag hierarchies like this help to enhance your ‘long-tail SEO’, described by Ian Lurie, founder and CEO of Portent, as ‘Specific, niche search phrases, usually more than two words in length, that offer a low competition, low search volume and high searcher intent’.

Keyword Density Alone Is Not Enough

Five or six years ago, if you increased your keyword density, you improved your search-engine ranking, more or less automatically. Today though, the algorithms of Google and its rivals are far more intelligent. To be top of the list, you need great content.

To improve rankings for your landing page, try to include 500+ words of relevant, editorial-style copy. Search engines love well developed content. Pictures and videos help a lot too.

For inspiration, check out Wikipedia. They divide their content into intuitive topics, and include references and header tags.

SEO is all about utilizing best practice to try and achieve the desired outcome. Fortunately, it’s easy to gauge the effect of the enhancements you make. Create landing pages using a platform like Lander, and you can do fast and easy A/B testing on your content. Helping your pages skyrocket up the rankings.