As SEO consultants, we have met many different clients in our working lives. We have noticed that many of them have the wrong understanding of landing pages. They don’t use the potential of this type of content properly. On the contrary, they often even cannibalise their own traffic by posting content in an uncoordinated way. Here are some important tips on how to properly handle static pages that are meant to attract as many visitors as possible from the target group.
What is the purpose of a landing page?
Usually, a landing page is set up with the purpose of, for example, catching visitors from an SEA campaign on a specific subpage. Or those who have been attracted by ads from social media. Usually they have very simple titles such as: domain.com/form-templates etc. This means that with one or two keywords in the URL, a clear statement is made about what visitors can expect there. But as it is with SEA and social media – when the campaign is over, the page just lies around uselessly until the next one. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
How to use a landing page even better
If you build pages for short-term use, you are giving away potential. Because you can always work on them from two directions and achieve excellent, sustainable SEO effects with them. Landing pages can be used, for example, to attract visitors who search for certain terms in Google. Take real estate agents, for example. They can mainly only draw attention to themselves through their offer of flats, houses or plots of land. For this reason, the clever ones among them set up content with added value that deviates somewhat from the main business. These are, for example, tools with which an online property valuation can be carried out. Or, they upload interactive maps in which buyers and sellers can read the rent index for a district or the land prices per square metre. This is how they attract people who are interested in the topic. These then often call to look after their property when it comes to selling or renting. If you pull the right lever here, you can generate a lot of relevant traffic via terms like:
- Real estate valuation online free of charge
- Rent index Zurich
- What to look out for when selling a property
- etc.
Most people already take this step. And if not, the agencies set up such pages for the clients. But even the SEO agencies forget that with such keywords you are not only fighting against the competition, but partly against yourself. This is a common mistake.
The most important mistake with landing pages
Despite good content and an existing added value through calculation tools etc., it often happens that the page does not rank well. Why? Well, many real estate agents, for example, try to get to the front with keywords like “real estate valuation” in order to generate traffic on this “byway”. So they start creating pages and writing blog articles that go something like this:
- How does a property valuation work?
- Property valuation – what to look out for?
- 5 or 10 tips for an optimal property valuation
and similar…
The result is a large volume of content, each of which is optimised for the keyword and also for the long tail “property valuation …. “. From this large number of “real estate valuation” texts, it can happen that Google does not know which of them is the most relevant. For this reason, the contents cannibalise each other because they rob each other of potential in the ranking. At this point, the SEO experts, if they understand their job, would have to use internal linking. All blog articles and all sub-pages with the above-mentioned topic must link to the landing page with the anchor text “real estate valuation”. Then Google knows about it. In this case, it will be preferred in the SERPS and receive the most link juice. This way, not only the many visitors from the paid campaigns but also from the organic search gather in one place. This is usually a sales booster, because the landing page is usually best optimised for sales or a call-to-action.