What's more important: drawing in more traffic, or converting the traffic you have? When it comes to your landing pages, that may be a tough question to answer. After watching today's Whiteboard Friday, you'll be better equipped to decide whether your site should opt for an SEO focus, a conversion focus, or a strategic balance of both.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about landing pages and conversion-focused landing pages versus SEO-focused landing pages.
So a few weeks back, I was at Unbounce's CTA Conference up in Vancouver, Canada, which was an amazing event, one of the best conferences that's put on in our industry, in my opinion. I got a question from a few folks there about how to decide whether to target a landing page toward SEO, toward conversion rate optimization and conversion-focused, or whether we could combine those. So I thought we'd chat a little bit about that today. It is quite doable.
An SEO-focused landing page has a few features that are unique from a conversion-focused landing page. In fact, both of them are unique. So what I'm going to do is use the example of Little Hotelier. Little Hotelier offers reservation software, front desk software for small hotels, B2Bs, guesthouses. I thought we could imagine basically a resource page on their website that was really a landing page that's focused on SEO around a hotel booking site database. So, of course, one of the things you have to do if you're a small hotel, or a B2B, or a guesthouse is you've got to get listed on hundreds if not thousands of different listing sites — Booking.com, Expedia, Travelocity, Kayak, etc., etc., all the way down the list, down to the very local-focused ones or regional-focused ones.
Managing all those listings is a real pain. So is managing the front desk and the bookings and making sure that everything is convenient. So Little Hotelier manages all this for us and has a resource page. It's not quite as good as the one I'm going to describe here. But let's just imagine for a sec that they have this list of all the hotel booking sites, a database of it with all the information you might want. Then, of course, they have their conversion-focused page, littlehotelier.com, their homepage, which is really all-in-one business software for B&Bs, and guesthouses and small hotels. This is very conversion-focused. They're trying directly to get people to buy the product.
This page is much more resource-focused. They're trying to get people to see, "Hey, here are all of those sites that, well, of course, Little Hotelier can help list you on and manage for you, but also here's just generic and general information about them." I think it'd be awesome if they listed all of these sites and included things like traffic and the number of bookings that they saw from those sites in 2015, the requirements to get listed, and the submission page. Then they could have a CTA, a call to action like, "Let Little Hotelier manage hotel bookings for your property."
This would work really as an SEO-focused landing page. It's designed to draw traffic in, to drive keywords like "list of hotel booking sites," "where to submit my small hotel," "most visited hotel booking sites." You could even make regional-focused ones of this, like "hotel listing sites New Zealand" if they wanted to have a New Zealand-focused set of sites where you could submit or manage yourself in the booking world. This one is really much more targeted, hypertargeted, only focused on the keywords that are going to convert people directly, like "small hotel software" or "B&B hotel reservation software," that kind of stuff.
The differences and identifying your needs
The differences between these two and the way to identify whether you need one or the other or need a mix of them is to ask a few questions. First off:
- Are you trying to rank for generic keywords or conversion-focused keywords?
- Are you trying to rank for both?
- Are you not worried about keyword rankings at all and you're only concerned with conversion?
If you're only concerned with conversion, then you want this one. But if you are worried about both ranking for keywords and trying to convert some visitors, you probably want a more content-focused page like this one, a more SEO-focused landing page.
Bounce rate and engagement rate
One of the needs that you have with SEO is that you need low bounce rate and high engagement rate. But the reverse is true here. You don't necessarily need to worry about bounce rate, engagement rate, you only need to worry about conversion rate.
SEO-focused: So this needs a low bounce rate and a high click-through rate. You want people staying on this page, you want them to click the call to action, and you want them to investigate more.
Conversion-focused: But on this page, actually a high bounce rate is okay if the conversion rate is high. So if people are converting from this page, it doesn't matter too much if a lot of people visit and many of them go away from here. That's not too important to you. You're just worried about conversion rate and optimizing for that conversion rate. If you can bring that up a percent, you don't mind if bounce rate also goes up 5% or 6% or 7% because you're turning people off who are the wrong customers.
Keyword targeting
SEO-focused: Here, you've got to have keyword-targeted content. That means the content itself needs to fulfill all the requirements that Google has and that visitors have around what they're looking for.
Conversion-focused: This, keyword targeting is secondary or might even be unnecessary entirely.
Editorial links
SEO-focused: This needs to be able to earn editorial links or it can't rank. If it can't earn editorial links, it's going to have a very, very difficult time with manual link building to a conversion-focused page. Commercially-focused pages are much tougher.
Conversion-focused: But this one doesn't even need to worry about links at all.
Audience
SEO-focused: This one has to serve many audiences. It's treated really like a piece of content that helps anyone who's looking for this information and then has a CTA, a call to action on the page.
Conversion-focused: But this one needs to be heavily focused on one particular audience, the particular audience Little Hotelier is trying to convert who's the right customer for them, for their software. Hopefully, those folks are already qualified.
SEO-focused: These folks over here are not necessarily qualified. This might be part of the qualification process. If you visit this page and you then say, "Huh, I'm kind of interested in letting them manage my bookings," maybe you should end up here, on this landing page that is conversion-focused.
Traffic
SEO-focused: This page should be driving traffic to those more conversion rate-focused pages.
Conversion-focused: This page, yes, it might rank for some keywords, but it's primarily concerned with direct conversions, and hopefully it's receiving traffic from other onsite channels, like this one, or offsite paid channels that are driving very targeted visitors.
What I'd urge you to do is ask yourself these questions when you're considering a landing page. Am I trying to earn traffic that might be interested in my content? If so, you're building one of these (SEO-focused). If you're trying to target an audience that is already qualified, that's already familiar with you, or that you're trying to get familiar with your product, then you're really trying to convert them, in which case you want one of these (conversion-focused).
Conversion-focused: These pages are great for doing tons of landing page testing and optimization. They're great for videos. They're great for testimonials.
SEO-focused: These types of pages are great for content. They're great for serving all sorts of visitor intense. They're great for targeting a large set of keywords that all have the same searcher intent.
When you try and mix these, things get a little challenging. That's where you really need to balance out and decide: "Hey, what is my primary goal here? Serve the searcher audience, which may not be conversion-focused, or convert people and not worry so much about the searcher audience. Maybe try to capture them on other pages before they get here."
All right, everyone, look forward to your comments, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Hey gang! Thanks for checking out this week's Whiteboard Friday.
Some questions I'm curious about:
1. We primarily build sites that have four elements
- Content pages = we are talking specifically about blogs / newsrooms that target long tail content terms + soft CTA
- Static SEO Pages = these are content pages that are targeting more generic keywords. Think of them as a (Wikipedia page for your industry) + a soft CTA. Usually long form content that covers as much as possible that is semantically appropriate. We try to drive links to these pages and to make them useful and compelling.
- Conversion Intent pages = such as "About us" or "Testimonials/case studies" pages that are a combination of static content and a hard CTA
- Conversion pages = product pages, contact us pages, free trial landing pages + hard CTA
We split these sites about 50%, 15%, 25%, 10% in the order above. For example, the blog and static SEO pages goals are to move traffic to the conversion intent pages, not make direct conversions themselves (though there is that option on-page). Then we'd like those visitors to research the brand and read the testimonials before moving to the product/conversion pages.
Obviously, all conversions don't move in such linear paths, but we find this helps prove content marketing attribution because we can use the site architecture to track traffic and engagement moving through these different sections of the site that have a gradually greater conversion intent. It also gives us insight into when the visitor starts to shift from a "content consumer" to a "potential lead" - helping us with our CLTV numbers.
2. I agree with you. Tools with content pages seem to be the best for quality traffic as they tend to build links faster than a blog post; especailly if the tool is orginial and UX friendly.
3. I've always liked the "Searchmetrics vs Brightedge" comparison landing page. The page ranks well, has a simple table that helps users (with conversion intent) compare the two tools. The CTAs are there, but they let the content do the convincing.
Just linking to that page you mentioned: https://www.searchmetrics.com/searchmetrics-brighte...
Appreciate the thorough response Daniel!
what's the difference between hard and soft CTA?
"Soft CTA" = Lead Gen or community engagement purposes. These are normally marketing / audience goals that prove higher funnel research or engagement intent - such as email sign up, whitepaper download or something as small as asking them to watch a video or go to the 'Contact Us' page.
"Hard CTA" = pure eComm driven. A business goal e.g. A sale; a 'click-to-call' button. Actions that prove conversion intent.
Note: Not every website has or needs both. If your site is not set up for eCommerce, then you should consider focusing on generating leads, not sales through content.
hai to @Daniel Hochuli
First of all i want to say that im new to this Moz Community,
2nd : your answers(i,e comments are helping me to learn more better)
3rd: dont mind you @Daniel Hochuli can you explain me what is Landing Pages in SEO
I tend to operate out of the belief that you can't be SEO-focused or CRO-focused.
You need to be user-focused.
Last May I wrote an article entitled "Semantic Search Strategy focuses on Human Needs and User Intent"
The crux of it is simple: The Algorithm isn't buying, People are. Win the People, the Algorithm will follow
A good landing page is beautiful and intelligent. It speaks to the user's needs, in the user's own language, and guides them into the funnel. It has the keywords and phrases that speak to the Intent of the user, thereby being "SEO-optimized", and because it understands Audience and Audience Intent, enjoys a low bounce rate and high conversion rate.
I think we're going to disagree slightly there David. Many search queries don't have purchase intent, and in order to rank well, you're going to need to put aside the desire to sell and convert in order to serve the searcher's need. A good example might be something like "standing desk benefits." You could try to sell folks on why they should buy your standing desk, but those SERPs are filled with research and news articles and the like, not pages that sell.
Like you said - serve the user - and sometimes, the user needs an SEO-targeted page (one that concentrates on helping searchers, earning links, and delivering great content), not a conversion-focused page (that is unlikely to earn engagement except from the small percent of people ready to buy, and even more unlikely to earn links needed to rank).
"But let's just imagine for a sec that they have this list of all the hotel booking sites, a database of it with all the information you might want." And then, let's imagine finding the desired specific information the user desires and needs, on a cell phone on a crowded noisy train with a slow connection, or someone with cognitive load (memory) issues that can't retain gobs of info, or the (hate to say it) older person who is traveling and can't find their reading glasses...or, and...SEO is definite must-have but so is page performance and user behavior. And competitive value. What makes their data the best choice? (If not revenue oriented, data integrity may be the conversion trigger, same as Google's insistence on quality of info.)
When SEO Began to Blur with CRO
Evermore I find that we're compelled to blur the lines between SEO and CRO. This began many years ago when official information was released, revealing that Meta descriptions do not have a 'special' place in Google's ranking algorithm.
Although Meta descriptions may not 'factor' as we thought they used to, they do help our existing rankings to work harder for us. This was when SEOs began to consider CRO (conversion rate optimisation), as SEOs realised that better converting SERPs (same ranking positions) led to demonstrably more traffic.
The Paradox
Here is the paradox. A search engine wants to reflect what people already like, so that they can find what they want. A new website wants to be found, but often doesn't come under the umbrella of being a compelling brand / entity with which the common public is already familiar, thus problems arise.
To get around this problem new brands, entities, organisations and (invariably) websites must 'prove' themselves. One way to do this is to become a compelling publisher, an authority on a particular topic which requires greater representation on the web. Since new webmasters eventually want to push their products and are often brand-appended, this is quite a difficult task.
Webmasters must overcome well established news sources and publications. They also have to convince the public that they're not as 'biased' as first assumptions might dictate.
Enter SEO Landing Pages
You should now be understanding why compelling content and transacting pages are often separate. If you're not, let me share one analogy: A business owner is looking at his website and realises that one special page has a conversion rate of almost 100%. Shocked, he takes this revelation to his marketing team. "I want everyone who comes to my site to land on this page!" - he says to them. "But sir" pipes up a junior designer. "This is just your shopping basket".
If 100% of your traffic landed on a checkout page, the bounce rate of that page would quickly become unfavourable. There would be no evidence on the page, that it matched a searchers query or that the website supplied what users were looking for.
And so - this type of data can never be taken at face value. Since there is a need to:
SEO landing pages are a must. But are you trying to attract search engines? No - common misconception. A Google bot will never buy one of your products. A search engine spider will never transact. You aren't trying to attract search engines, you are trying to attract humans who are using search engines.
So how Should SEO Landing Pages be Constructed? With CRO FIRMLY in Mind!
What does this mean? It means that part of the very fabric of an SEO landing page is that it mustn't deter real people. On the other side, it is design / developments responsibility to ensure that there are as few pages and clicks as possible from your landing page to the final transaction. This is done by looking at things like your checkout. Does it send users through multiple checkout pages and forms? If so - why? Is all the data you're getting worth the financial loss you are assuming in terms of missed conversions?
SEOs must write landing pages for humans and search engines. The content must be real and deep in some way, whether in a creative (inline tables, bullet lists and stats in an article) or creative (the information is presented in an interactive, fun, intuitive way) sense. In addition to this, the framework surrounding the landing page (navigation, transactional user flow) must be conducive to human end-user behaviour.
To Answer Your Question Directly
So what percentage effort do I put into the SEO vs CRO effectiveness of a page? Let me give you an answer that won't add-up at first:
This means that I spend 75% of my own time on the SEO, 25% of my own time on the CRO - and 50% of a trained designer's time on the CRO
For me, this is the best time / activity spread as I work in an agency, as part of a cutting edge team.
Thanks to Rand for the great question
My two cents: It depends on the type of campaign.
If a landing page is going to be used to get paid traffic (online advertising campaigns), then it should focus on conversion. After all, when people click on an ad, they know that they're going to be pushed to do something.
If a landing page is going to be used to get organic traffic (SEO campaigns), then it should focus more on traffic and great content and less on conversion -- especially when the targeted keywords are informational queries and not transactional ones.
Yeah - I think there's overlap, but that's often a decent way to think about the differences between the two. Thanks for the contribution Samuel!
Perhaps PPC is not the only way to get traffic for a conversion focused page, but it is the most common one.
The economics, search intent, and user needs are so much more different when it comes to PPC-driven traffic to landing pages than they are for organic ranking/resources/research (a.k.a. "SEO"), that compromise is absolutely the wrong approach to take. It might seem feasible or just the nice thing to do, but SEO considerations, in my opinion, shouldn't come anywhere near the process for creating and testing landing pages in many verticals. Especially consider lead gen in fields like software, consumer finance, or high ticket B2B services. Companies are throwing five or six figures a month (six or seven figures annually) right at a narrow set of landing pages that absolutely must convert optimally given that the competition is driving up CPC's (often because they can afford to do so, because they're really good at converting high-intent visitors to some form of lead). Time and again, I've seen companies fail to make it out of the batter's box with PPC because they're trying to think about SEO on pages that must convert at a certain CPA ($500, or $200, let's say) to have any hope of making the marketing spend profitable. Focus on CRO for these pages, entirely. And forget completely about SEO. That same hypothetical company of course needs a separate SEO effort and a separate, full scale content effort. All companies should put their best foot forward in all channels. But not by getting all compromis-ey with landing pages that are gobbling through $12 clicks and trying to survive in a cutthroat auction environment.
There are a reasonable number of exceptions to this, such as in the bread-and-butter channel, e-commerce. But SEO strategy in this case doesn't need to depart too far from decent labeling and taxonomy, and creating additional resources as one sees fit outside of product and category pages.
As for "the decision criteria should be the audience," sure, but let's be clear on how vastly different the audience is with PPC, since we have so much control over that audience day-to-day. And let's also consider the more important point, "the decision criteria should be how much you are paying for that click." In today's PPC environment in many verticals, we aren't talking about pennies. Often, it's dollars. If the economics don't work in fairly short order, the campaign gets shut down forever.
The Moz community means well, but it's evident that to this day, most of its members don't care much for PPC.
Yeah - we're definitely a very SEO-focused community here, and my background and personal focus is on SEO (and content). Hopefully, we're not shy about expressing that viewpoint and I tried to be very transparent with that in the video, too.
I have experienced the cutthroat auction environment lately as well and cannot seem to get past the trademark issue using the work "LinkedIn". As my client's work centers around creating and optimizing professional LinkedIn profiles, this is really hard in both AdWords and Facebook. This seems to force us to focus more on earned SEO and less able to leverage paid search. You advice is welcome!
Hi Rand and thank you for this video.
I've a question for you: I'm working to optimize a landing page talks about my new service. Sure, people know something about this service but they don't know anything about the company and about its brand, so I'm creating a landing page with more SEO content to inform people and to capture its interest. Moreover, I add to this landing page some testimonials, a video and other elements which is more conversion oriented. I think I'm creating a mix of these two type of landing and of course I have to check both the ranking, the bounce rate, the CTR and every other elements. Maybe it's a hard work, but I think it's the right way to do my landing. How do you think about that? Thank you very much for every whiteboard Friday, I appreciate them a lot!
Laura
Hi Laura - yeah, I'd say if you know you need to rank, need to earn links, need to have high engagement, AND need to have a good conversion rate, it's worth the work. Just be ready for a tough slog - those are some of the toughest pages to create and market!
BOTH, why split efforts consciously, the only reason to not do it is becouse is difficult to get both things and is better at least get something, even only traffic :)
Thanks Rand, Great whiteboard !
I loved the suggestions gave for the website reviewed as an example for adding more relevant information that the visitors might be seeking like "traffic and the number of bookings that they saw from those sites in 2015, the requirements to get listed, and the submission page". Along with that a CTA to direct the user to make an expected action.
This example shows that can make best use of SEO focused page and incorporate conversion related aspects with CTA.
As usual, great Whiteboard Friday! My only question is, where did you get that shirt?!?
Tha'ts the first thing i though!! Glad i'm not the only one crazy here haha :)!
Great Whiteboard Friday. Very interesting topic. I can see both sides of this coin. If your a new business that sells lawn service well say, You have been doing this for years. Word of Mouth and Great service have been your bread and butter for years. Now you decide its time to get on the internet. You create a great site, its has a great landing page and it also has a booking service page. The booking service page would need the conversion focused you talk about. Doesn't it also need the SEO to drive traffic? So is this not putting the chicken before the egg or the cart before the horse.
Hi Rand, yet another amazing white board friday (allthough I always read it on saturday morning). Every page needs to have a certain goal, are you going for conversion, are you going for traffic, are you going for interaction etc. Well explained!
Thanks! Yeah, it pays to build a list of your content and the keywords they target (or where they get traffic), then mark those pages as conversion-focused, SEO-focused, or both (and which matters more).
To answer your question... it's not a matter of either/or or both, because the question is slightly skewed to the conversation of SEO. It's not a matter of should you be optimizing the page for SEO... but more, you should be optimizing a page to generate more revenue for your business via the organic search channel. This may sound like a matter of semantics, but it's really the heart of the issue when it comes to digital marketing - the lack of focus on true KPIs vs. diagnostic metrics.
Everything a marketing is doing should be about the money. If you're not focusing on that conversion, of whatever type, then why would you bother?
You might say, "Well, our goal is 'awareness,'" and I would have to tell you, no it isn't. Your goal is more sales, and you're trying to do that by increasing the awareness of your brand or product. But even then, it's not just awareness that you're seeking, because people may become suddenly very aware of your product for a variety of reasons and have no intention of ever buying anything from you. So, what you're really looking for is an increase in purchase intent and if you're not directly selling something, there are a variety of conversion proxies by which to measure your campaign (leads, product locators, coupons, etc.) that would be the actual goal of the campaign.
You might say, "My goal is to get more people to read my content," or "engagement," or a variety of other "content marketing" style metrics, but again, I would say, "no no." You're trying to move those diagnostic metrics around to get to your actual goal, increasing revenue, and if they're not doing that, then you're just arranging deck chairs.
To bring it home... when I advise clients on their keyword focus, more times than not, I end up moving them away from the terms that are important to them (usually out of vanity or just a lack of understanding of how humans search for things they want) vs. those that actual make them money. When you watch the dials move within Moz, it's really about providing you insights into the ebb and flow of the revenue from the organic search channel.
Your thought pattern should be... "Why is revenue up/down? Is it from the organic search channel? What page/product? What changed here? Has session volume changed? Has the conversion rate for that page change? Did a term that makes us money (gets us leads, etc.) change in placement? Ah ha!" The thought pattern should never be... "We lost rank on a given term - panic!" unless you know already that the term in question is "money."
So, the answer is... "all the things!" because it all matters... but none if it matters if you're not looking at the money.
Well, we're gonna disagree there Jeff, but it might just be because we've got different experiences helping or focusing on different sorts of websites. As I've often noted, Moz spends a tremendous amount of energy and effort on content that doesn't convert directly at all (like WB Friday itself!). Our goal, and my goal with this company, are broader than revenue, and I've found that, interestingly enough, many companies who don't make revenue their only explicit goal often benefit in outsized ways from their non-revenue strategies :-)
I tend to be partial to the SEO landing page approach. Focusing on a conversion oriented page would only be worthwhile if the page received an abundance of traffic (or at least some traffic). With the SEO approach (or a carefully executed combination of the two) we can better leverage visibility, but I'm also a content geek, so I'm bias! Thanks Rand.
Awesome WBF as always Rand :)
1. We do maintain 60:40 ratio respectively to SEO & CRO. We are also doing A/B testing in timely manner based on audience data. Currently we are building pages with regards to CRO & SEO which provides best results.
2. We run various social media & paid campaigns with specific segment audience data, with the specific time frame we gather the results and decide the final blueprint for next campaign. Also we provide free consultation with our services to grab initial engagement to end users.
3. There are many but currently these 2 came up in my mind. Seer interactive & Ayima
Happy Weekend!
Hi Rand@
If we talk about SEO, then why should we focused for landing page only. I think every pages should be analyzed and focused. It depends on the nature of the pages but as i have experienced, if some pages are not targeted by specific keywords, those pages matters too for branding pages.
Hi Rand!!!
As you say, that time will depend upon the objectives and needs of each business. I am in favor of making life easier customer, and therefore, I'm a fan of monetizing a landing page, but do not give forget that many times, you can simply interested in us generate traffic ...
Good Weekend
Hi Guys,
Back in Jan 2016, we created a landing page for our company with typical conversion intend with putting a few CTA's in the page and information about the products, as laura said.. we have inserted all the things from company info to few words of content, testimonials and Contact form, etc
And the results are vary.. that page helped us to improve traffic, and rank for few of our keywords..but not that much in conversion. For the Keywords on which our ranks improved.. are the same keywords for which we did the Paid ads.
I am not so sure why this happened.. but may be now i am going to redo all things and try a new way out..!!
Thanks for Whiteboard.. Rand :)
Sometimes, it's the case that it takes a longer searcher-journey to convert and many of the pages you rank for will contribute to that journey, but indirectly. For example, here at Moz, it's 7.5-8+ visits before someone takes a free trial of our software, and the more they visit before they take that trial, the longer they tend to stick with the subscription.
Some of the best food for thought on Moz comes from you, Mr. Fishkin. Many thanks for sharing your expertise. The issue seems like a chicken-egg scenario. In my work I've solved the question by giving precedence overwhelmingly to SEO. Why? If no one goes to the site conversion is zero. So any work spent on converting is mute if people aren't getting (or do not see) the site. At times I'm sure we've gone overboard with purely SEO efforts to the detriment of all else. But truth be told I don't think there is a balance in this crazy business. In my view, you need to (1) go balls out on the SEO (though I am learning the hard way this increasingly means "realness" and "goodness" and "user experience" as opposed to any SEO technical tricks or schlock) AND (2) you need to go balls out on the conversion aspects of a site. Once someone lands on your creation it best be the best it can be to convert that person on what you are about. I mention all of this in response to the notion of a "strategic balance" between SEO and conversion. I don't think there can be such a balance. Both have to be maxed out and good, good, good. This might not sound overly revealing or earth-shattering but I think we are fooling ourselves in seeing one more important than the other.
Carl Kruse
Hey Rand, Great WBF.. I agree with your Explanations..
I believe, websites must not have same page for SEO (Search Traffic) and Conversions, as it will limit opportunities for testing different landing pages, placement of video, placement of form or buttons, etc.. Also, as we observed that google uses User signals, engagement metrics and pogo sticking in its search ranking algo, so if your page is focused on SEO + Conversion, then you might find it tough to rank or tough to stay on Higher rank because there are chances of the pogo sticking issue and High Bounce Rates which means low engagement and user is not satisfied with the page.. and google might push your site down in SERPs.. This can be a case..
So, IMO one must go for Many SEO focused Pages with CTA which will direct users to the Landing Page / Conversion Focused Page.
Adding to this, One must also try separate Landing Page.. One for Paid Traffic and Another for the traffic which is coming from the SEO Focused Pages. Because in one case, you have to teach alot to your leads and in the other case your audience already knows and read alot about your service and how you / your product can help them. and this might help by saving time if you are Large Organization..
Great whiteboard!
I was kind of taught that landing pages weren't very useful, but the way you break down their uses in the right situation makes perfect sense.
Yeah - certainly for anything you drive paid traffic to, conversion-focused landing pages are going to be very important.
This is a constant struggle in the SEO world. It's very tough to have a high ranking "conversion optimized page" unless your site authority is extremely strong.
I believe content heavy, SEO focused landing pages can be very helpful to users especially in the awareness phase, but they likely wouldn't have strong conversion rates. After initially being exposed to your brand, you may enter the consideration set or at least be familiar in the minds of your target audience in the future.
Hi Rand!!
it all depends on the goals. with a landing page you can search monetize that landing page, or you can search traffic or any other type of conversion (customers, leads ...). Very well explained
Coming from an SEO perspective, one of the things that has always interested me about PPC is the control you get with landing pages, especially with the insights you get with Google. It's really interesting to watch pieces of organic content transform to become very conversion-driven. Very interesting WBF topic!
I think the decison criteria should be the audience. As you know the audience, it's easier to know how to convert them.
If you know which precise audience will come on your landing pages, you can decide to use conversion-focused landing pages. This may be the case when people search very specific keywords or if you direct trafic from advertising campaigns.
If you don't precisely know the audience, conversion landing pages will not get results. Use SEO-focused landing pages instead and try to qualify the audience.
Benoit Arson
GetLandy
Nice ! Another good whiteboard Friday,
I am really thankful to you @Rand Fishkin - you have saved my job. I was looking for this tips from last week cause i got a notice from my management team regarding conversion Rate Issue. I am working on a project for the last 3 months. My target is only 10 Leads, but i managed only 3-4. cause i have no idea to contact whom to create a landing page and to increase the conversion rate. I have enough experience for SEO Friendly page. but now, you helped me to understand my mistake. Thanks and share valuable tips every Friday.
You always want to think about SEO whenever you create a page, but building for people, not search engines, is always the first rule of SEO. By that rationale, building for conversions is the top priority and you should do what you can to optimize the page after that.
I think I might slightly disagree. When I'm doing SEO, I'm always actively thinking about the search engines - ignoring them means you don't concern yourself with critical pieces of the puzzle - everything from meta descriptions to descriptive titles, to smart keyword usage, to rel=canonical, schema markup, crawl friendliness, and more. It's a nice platitude to say "build for people, not engines," but I don't think it accurately captures reality.
Hi Rand,
Great vid! How do you see conversion pages integrating into overall site structure w/ clean breadcrumbs? I can see how SEO/content pages would easily fit in a sitemap, but conversion pages seem a bit trickier. Would you recommend making them orphan pages?
In my opinion most of the websites are worried about conversion rate, but they worried about SEO first. Probably the combination of them in a precise measure can be the best option.
Good article, thanks for sharing
in my opinion the landing page should always focus in be a visual page, if the person feels its a professional website its more probable that the conversión is better.
I see many websites that visually are bad and even having a goodSEO they don't sell nothing
hai to @Rand Fishkin
i dont know whether to ask this kind of question to you or not. but need it so bad to ask this question
the thing is that Rand Fishkin there is lots of things are to be consider to targetting a keyword,choosing proper seo on/off page optimization, content relevancy linking all these bla bla blaaa etc are required to rank a websites agreed.?
But point is how to non content related sites like putlockers,solarmovies, and some other music sites are ranking in google even though they dont have all the requirements as i explained above
it will be helpfull to me if you replyto my question,
hey Rand,
for affiliates sites, what would be the strategy? conversion optimized or SEO?
Great post!
I did so much of R&D for landing page and got all my questions answered here. Its really helpful.
But I want to know If I just want a landing page with a query form and not much text in that,
then is it possible to rank that page for keywords in google by doing SEO?
If it is possible then how much time will that take and how that can be done?
I should confess that you are a great teacher,too. I have learned a lot in a short while, thanks to your art of teaching.
Hey Rand, that was a great article.
can you clarify on how to form a suitable long tail keyword for your website?
It is a special type of article to treat landing pages in two different ways. Nice discussion. Thanks a lot for talking about this matter related to seo services!
To answer your questions Rand...
1. I build landing pages weekly for ourselves or clients. Most of them (over 50%) need a balance of conversion and ranking, but remarketing is slowly decreasing this number.
2. I've found that longer form pages work with conversion so that at the top of the page I'm free to add the 'converion' elements, then underneath the CTA I add the 'SEO' based content etc.
Good article! I usually use SEO landpages because conversion landpages need lots of traffic to work properly.
Regards,
Czd
You need to create converting landing pages but also have something in mind to entice return visitors to come back every now and then by providing a news section or an email subscription service.
Shouldnt SEO and CRO go hand in hand? I mean yes some sites are primarily Conversion focussed but as per our organization, the conversion focussed page you showed comes only after the SEO one after the CTA is clicked..well that was my question as well..being a newbee I need some more guidance perhaps.
Did you check out the video? I think it addresses exactly the question you're asking about here.
The real problem is that SEO focus pages should be conversion optimized, otherwise you will waste your organic traffic. With little efforts and A/B testing we can make a page that is SEO focused i.e has a lot of keyword targeted content with CTAs in almost every fold and forms in the first fold. Nothing is universal in this, you will have to test different layouts/placements of forms and CTAs by using heat maps.
Hi Rand,
Thanks for the latest Whiteboard edition and it’s a great read.
I believe if we are promoting a page via SEO then it should be both SEO and Conversion-Focused. SEO landing pages are a great way of attracting visitors who are searching for a specific product, services or solution. But at the same time there should be some great elements incorporated in the page that can help in converting those visitors into a conversion or lead.
For me both are important.
Also, if you are promoting a landing page via paid ads then it should be totally conversion focused.
I look forward for the next edition.
Presentation pages ought to have importance to your Keywords if utilizing SEO and Ad's substance in case you're searching for change and ctr. Solidarity all through your site, advertisement and catchphrases is key to be perceived as a 'client inviting' organization and definitely will rank better bringing better results whether Organic or Paid.
What caught my attention the most is the sales funnel, and I guess it actually depends on how you convince your client. Anyway, I found lots of great information here. Thanks.
Nice, I think that landing page seo focused is best, automatically conversions are going. Just you generate quality vistors
Hi Rand, I want to thanks for sharing this. Such a Great Whiteboard.I was also waiting for this type of whiteboard(related to conversion), So happy to read this WBF.
Hi Rand,
Much needed guide to increase the time-on-site. Another good Whiteboard Friday..
Its really very useful article, i think it helps a lot to blog runner
Great Article..nice one..i hope it will be very useful..
Hi Rand,
Great instruction as always. Can you explain or direct me to a link that explains what "earn editorial ranks" means?
That should be "links" - editorial links are those given without any financial consideration, cajoling, or convincing. They come because the creator of content on another site truly wants to cite your work and refer others to it.
It is always hard to manage for conversions. Well I am now more clear for CRO. Thank you
Hi Rand
Important guide to increase a website. Amazing Whiteboard Friday.
We Want to "Store Builder Website" related Some Instructions.
All is Good.
Great article, only for SEO can be perfect, but both are brilliant
While considering to optimise a landing page, its keywords that ultimately decides whether the page is going to be content oriented or conversion oriented. Thanks for sharing great insights about it!!
Landing pages should have relevance to your Keywords if using SEO and Ad's content if you're looking for conversion & ctr. Unity throughout your site, ad and keywords is vital to be recognised as a 'customer friendly' company and surely will rank better bringing better results whether Organic or Paid.
thanks rand, this was very helpful for my clients site.
Good reflexión, sometimes only think in SEO but, forget conversion, both are important!
very good