Landing pages are the most important part of your whole website. This is where your visitors are going to land first and convert into a lead and responsible for your business growth. But what if he finds it least attractive and unable to convince your visitors? Well, this can increase your website bounce rate and lower your website ranking on SERPs. To avoid this, it is better to make a SEO checklist that you can implement to create landing pages more effective and attractive.
Designing an attractive website is one factor and making it SEO-friendly to rank on search engine pages is another factor that we need to work on. SEO is all about delivering the best user experience to your customers in all possible ways. SEO or search engine optimization is a tried and tested strategy that helps improve the overall performance of the website and landing pages as well. It will make your website search engine friendly, increase conversion rate and boost the ranking of landing pages. If you’re confused about how to improve landing page design with the help of SEO, we have created a whole checklist you can follow.
10 SEO Checklist for Landing Page Design
What if your customers land on the wrong page? Yes, this could be possible if you have not updated your landing page designs with SEO strategies. Optimizing your landing pages with SEO checklist will help filter out search queries and help people find your landing pages easily on search engines.
People only place search queries when they are planning to buy something or finding solutions to a problem, and if they land exactly on the same page they were looking for will motivate them to perceive your landing pages. It will increase conversions and help gather more and more visitors on your landing pages. Google also gives preferences to the landing pages on search engines and ranks them faster than the whole website. So without wasting your time, let’s begin with SEO checklist for landing page design.
Identify your target audience
Always remember that you’re designing and optimizing your website for your audience and not for yourself. And to target them, you need to understand your audience first. You can keep their choice preferences, search behavior, and interest in mind while designing landing pages or websites for them. Suppose you’re planning to make a website for kid’s wear or a website offering medical tool kits. Both are entirely opposite categories and target audiences as well, so you need to learn their demographics and geographic locations before setting your SEO strategies.
Find relevant keywords
Keywords are the core of your SEO strategies, and keyword research is the first and foremost step of search engine optimization. Finding business-related keywords play a crucial role in optimizing your website and landing pages on search engine pages.
Effectively researched and optimized keywords help boost your website traffic and uplift your website ranking on search engines. Including more and more keywords into your website content, metadata, and Alt text will make your website search engine friendly and also help users to find your website on Google. Researching keywords can be a daunting task.
Better to rely on keyword research tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, KWfinder, Moz, etc., to find the most relevant business-related keywords. These are some most reliable SEO tools experts use to find keywords and get other website performance stats.
Update metadata
The page title and meta descriptions are collectively called metadata or snippets. These metadata are different for each web page which help describe your landing pages. Adding a title and short descriptions in each landing page makes it easier for Google to crawl and index your website and helps users find your landing out billions of pages.
Unique, optimized landing pages promote more organic searches attracting organic traffic, and help customers to find the right information online. Writing catchy and pitching meta titles and descriptions need skills and experience, better to hire experienced content if you think you’re not skilled enough.
Optimize landing page content
80% of the website is all about content, and if you want to optimize your website, you need to optimize your content first. Content optimization is the process of making your content readable to the web, and your audience. 75% of people make decisions based on your website content. Offering quality content helps gather user’s attention and make your website search engine-friendly. Keyword insertion, Adding headlines H1, H2, interlinking with inner pages and outer pages, etc., are some of the content optimization strategies that you can follow to optimize your website content.
- Use readable font
- include enough white space between paragraphs and visuals
- Write short paragraphs paragraphs
- Initiate with some pitchy line headline
- Don’t forget to write a summary and conclusion at the end
- Keep it short, crisp, and understandable
- Write in bullets and pointers
These are some SEO writing tips that you can follow to create SEO- friendly content for your website and landing page.
Eliminate broken links
Broken or non-existing links in the landing pages can leave a negative impression on your customer. Non- existing or broken links show unprofessionalism and reduce the credibility of your business. If you’re designing and optimizing a landing page, make sure while creating inbound or outbound links in the web pages works properly and redirects to the right page. It is also advisable to regularly check and monitor the performance of the links and see if they are working correctly and displaying on the correct pages. Benefits of interlinking into your landing pages;
- Increase the credibility of the pages
- Help redirect visitors to other website pages
- Increase the credibility of content
- Help Google crawl and index landing pages more easily
- Attract more and more visitors to your website
- Increase website performance and visibility on search engine pages
Increase page acceleration
How fast are your landing pages opening? Is it giving the best user experience to your visitors? Well, these are some basic questions you need to ask yourself before optimizing your landing pages. Fast loading landing pages are directly related to the best user experience.
To make your landing pages search engine friendly and want to attract customers, make sure your landing pages are opening within 2-3 seconds; otherwise, you will lose your potential customers. Speed is a crucial ranking factor for not only landing pages but also for the whole website and the main reason why visitors stay on your site.
Page speed greatly boosts the search engine ranking and increases the website user experience. Factors that can affect page loading speed;
- Heavy image files – One image is equal to 100 words, but using a lot of image files on the page can decrease the page loading speed. Better to avoid using a lot of images and only use where it is needed. Also, don’t forget to optimize it before uploading it on websites or landing pages.
- Large Videos files – Large video files in the website sometimes make your website slow, which can drive your website traffic to other sites. It is recommended to upload compressed video files to maintain the website loading speed.
- SEO plugins – Downloading a number of plugins may also affect your website speed; avoid doing that
- Irrelevant element on the page – Only put elements that are 100% needed in the website and ignore the irrelevant elements to increase website or web page loading speed.
You can try these best WordPress caching plugins to improve performance of your website.
Optimize it for Mobile Searches
Mobile users are drastically increasing with each passing day, and they all are using mobile phones over desktops for various activities, including navigation, online shopping, learning, chatting, etc., due to its convenience and availability. It is reported that 55% of total web searches are coming from mobile users. If you’ve not updated your website for mobile phone users, then it is high time for that before it’s too late. You need to consider many factors for optimizing your website for mobile devices, including web page loading speed, Design format, quality of the content, and user-friendliness of the landing page. Better take help from a web developer or SEO professional for this job.
Well-defined page layouts
Unformatted page layouts with scattered elements can be the main reasons your website is losing customers. In order to avoid this, you need to pay special attention to the web page and website layout and structure.
- Make sure the content is aligned, navigation, and the menu is placed in the right place.
- Give preference to white space in between the content and other elements in the web page.
- Highlight the important points where you want your user to spend more time.
- Work on header and footer of the website
- Place your logo at the right place
- Do not use complicated features complex design
- Avoid content overlapping
- try to keep them clean and tidy so that users can be easily targeted.
Design your landing pages voice search ready
Voice searches are very much similar to live conversation, where users use voice recognition features to place their search queries. Voice searches are very trending in 2021, and businesses optimizing their website or landing pages for voice searches end up making good profits. To optimize your landing, use long-tail keywords instead of short ones, write content in question answers and FAQ form, add a call-to-action button, etc.
Add call-to-action
The purpose of designing and optimizing is to get more and more leads and generate ROI. What if your website fails to do that? Well, it can make it difficult for you to reach your business goals. But adding call-to-action appeal to your landing pages can change the game. It motivates people to take action on your website and attracts more and more customers to your website. Buy Now, Click here, Read more, Checkout, etc., are some more commonly used Call-to-actions buttons that you can use in your content or anywhere on your website to engage users on your website.
