As a web solutions company we often hear the words “I’m not being found on Google for this keyword.” The customer may have added this keyword to their site but sometimes just adding a keyword to a websites homepage doesn’t quite pack the punch needed to make a dent into the search engine listings for a competitive keyword.
Something we like to utilise as a company to address this issue are landing pages. These are pages within your website that are created just to target a specific keyword and our clients have had some great successes with this.
The term landing is when a person has clicked on a link on Google or another search engine and entered your website, essentially ‘landing’ on your site. A ‘landing page’ therefore is the page that the visitor who clicked the link has ‘landed’ on. A common landing page for most website is the home page, however with some clever SEO work any page within your website can be engineered to become a landing page, bringing you more traffic and allowing you to target a larger variety of keywords.
There are several steps to creating a landing page and these are as follows:-
Firstly choose a keyword or phrase that you would like to be found for on a search engine. For example a dentist based in oxford who may be looking to target local traffic might choose the keyword ‘dentist surgery oxford’
The next step is to create a new page within your website; sometimes you may wish to hide this page from the menu structure but still keep it present on the sitemap of the website. This means that it is visible to search engines but not clogging up your general website structure.
Thirdly and the most important step it to create the content for the webpage.
When creating your page content there are several important items that must be included
· A title – This title should be given a H1 tag. The title of your page should ideally contain your chosen keywords or phrase in this case my heading would be ‘Dentist surgery Oxford’
· Links – This is very important, there is no point in drawing your customers to a page if there is nowhere for them to go! Links should be relevant to the keywords and usually directed towards a sale. On this page I may link to the Oxford branch contact page or to the book an appointment page.
· Interesting! – Colour, Pictures and animations to draw the visitor into the page.
· Keyword rich content – Your content on a landing page has two purposes, firstly it should be good readable content that a visitor to your site would find engaging and interesting. Secondly it should target the search engines and be keyword rich, an example of some potential text can be found below.
“Sams dental surgery is one of the top dental practices the first place to look for a dentist in oxford Oxfordshire . Our specialist team of dentists will provide you with the care you need. As an NHS dental practice we provide free dentistry under the age of 16 and reduced rates for everyone else. Whether you are looking for teeth whitening, crowns, cosmetic dentistry or just a check-up in oxford, Sams dental surgery can help you in a calm relaxed atmosphere.”
As you can see with the above content it is engaging as it talks about free dentistry for under 16s lists the services provided and reads well. In addition to this the text is keyword rich we can see the word oxford dentist/dental/dentistry and surgery have all been used several times but the key to this is they have all been used in context and not just shoved in to pack the text full of keywords.
Once the page has been created it must be tuned correctly, tuning of a landing page should be directed towards the keywords or phrases the page is targeting. It is important not to muddy the water when tuning a landing page e.g. only keywords directly related to the page should be entered, Do not muddy the water!
Overall we find that landing pages, if created correctly, can be a fantastic tool to increase your websites presence on search engine listings. Give it a go and see what results you get!
