How to Pick the Right URL for Your Landing Page

Each landing page will have a unique URL with two parts: an identifier and a page title. The identifier is unique to the list associated with your page. The URL can be previewed in the Landing Page Builder, it will be activated after you publish the link. The URLs can be edited after you publish them. But still, take enough time to finalize the URL that is right for your page.

Of course, by the time you're creating a landing page, you've laid out your roadmap for how you'll gain traction in your market.

The importance of your choice of URL

This is something you might not have given sufficient thought of when setting up your landing page.  A well-chosen landing page URL can give a boost to your online marketing in two ways:

Can help your landing page rank higher search engine results.
Can help you convert more landing page visitors into buyers.

If done poorly, it can be a true “weak link” in your marketing “chain”, resulting in some lost sales opportunities.

So let's talk about how you can “do it right” when you are selecting your landing page URLs.
Here are a few best practices for landing Page URLs. Craft and customize your page URLs, make them more recognizable by your prospects and audience.


Keywords Matter

Understand that the choice of URL affects the landing page's SEO performance. Remember that despite all of the changes Google has made recently to give SEO credit to good content and to penalize poor content, including content stuffed with keywords, keywords still matter. When keywords are used properly, they can help a website or landing page rank higher in search results. They help you when they are placed in the on-page content of the landing page, and they can help you more when they are strategically placed in the URL.

Consider the following landing page URL examples.
Let's assume they will take visitors to a landing page that has a reservation signup form for Luigi's Italian restaurant in San Francisco:

http://mywebsite.com/n=88010572&fid=1&mid

vs.

http://mywebsite.com/Italian-Restaurants-San-Francisco-Luigis

Notice how the second, customized landing page URL contains the search phrase “Italian Restaurants San Francisco”? What if you owned “Luigi's” Italian Restaurant?  Would you have this URL to help you come up higher search results more often?

Create URLs not only for search engines but for people

Put yourself in the place of someone searching Google for an Italian restaurant in San Francisco. Which of the above two URLs do you think is more likely to get clicked on? I think we can safely assume the second one will receive a lot more clicks, don't you agree? Those who click through are more likely to already be “primed” to make a reservation for Luigi's Restaurant. They are online searching for an Italian restaurant in San Francisco. They've clicked the URL to visit Luigi's reservation landing page.

The second landing page URL example gives them a strong hint of what they can expect to see on the other side. It makes sense to conclude this customized, keyword-rich landing page URL can help increase conversion rates!

When you are changing a landing page name for SEO purposes, remember two things:

Don't “stuff” keywords in your landing page URL

When you are optimizing a web page or landing page URL for SEO, remember to keep it short; avoid “spammy” keyword stuffing. To quote Matt Cutts of Google:

“If you have three, four or five words in your URL, that can be perfectly normal...ask yourself: How does this look to a regular user? – because if, at any time, somebody comes to your page and finds 15 words all strung together like variants of the same word, then that does look like spam. So, don’t make  a big habit of having tons and tons of words stuffed in there, because there are plenty of places on a page, where you can have relevant words and have them be helpful to users – and not have it come across as keyword stuffing”

Stuffing your URL with keywords cause an SEO backlash

It could also confuse and drive your potential customer to one of your competitors. Like we've said before on this blog, “confusion kills conversion”.

So another place, besides SEO, where keywords in a URL can have an effect (positive or negative) on your landing pages is with the conversion. And please remember this: the purpose of a landing page is to convert. Think back to our example of the two URLs a moment ago:

http://mywebsite.com/n=88010572&fid=1&mid

v/s

http://mywebsite.com/Italian-Restaurants-San-Francisco-Luigis

Now imagine you are searching for an Italian restaurant in San Francisco. If you see these two URLs in a list of search results, you'll be more inclined to click on the second one, don't you agree?

And when you read the keyword-rich landing page URL text, you'll have a strong hint about the results you'll get, a solid idea about what you'll see on a landing page on the other side of that URL.

Do you see how this could help Luigi's reservation landing page on the other side of that URL experience a higher conversion rate?

Your choice of URLs can affect the SEO and conversion results you experience with your landing pages. You want these results to be in your favor. You want your landing page URLs to drive interested potential customers to you, not away from you to one of your competitors.

Let your URLs be readable

URLs with a long string of numbers and special characters is a bad idea. This is because such URLs don't tell your prospects anything about where the link will take them. So, why should they click on it? In order to avoid this, customize your URL, and use complete words wherever necessary. Skip the stop words. Remove words like 'and', 'the', 'or' to simplify and shorten the URLs, as these words aren't so much necessary to convey the meaning to your prospects. At the same time, take care of the readability and length of the URL into consideration.

Let you page URL match the page content

Let your URL tell the prospects and audience, what information they are getting and where the link is taking them when they click on your link. It is better to customize the landing page URL with anything that indicates what your landing page promotes.

Shorter the URLs, the better

The information online has a shorter attention span and the viewers tend to digest information quickly. In this case, the URLs about 50–60 characters can be effective. If your landing page URL happens to be much longer than that, think about how you can shorten it. Emphasize more on the keywords and the information that is vital for the prospect or the customer to know from the URL.

Landing pages are an important part of the online marketing process. You want the very best landing page platform available. As a busy marketer, entrepreneur or business manager, you want the easiest to set up a landing page platform can have. So go ahead, try Lander’s  landing page templates for free