The Landing Page to Focus On in 2016
Let’s define what a landing page is, it’s basically a separate page on your website or another site created for visitors that clicked on your Ad. This page is created to generate conversions.
For example, if you are running a pay-per-click ad for Upholstery Cleaning you need to create a page that when they click on that ad it goes to a page about Upholstery Cleaning and entails the deal. It DOES NOT make sense to do an ad for Upholstery and then if they click on the ad they are directed to a page about Tile Cleaning, that will confuse the visitor and more than likely won’t generate a phone call. Most of the time what happens is people do pay-per-click ad and when visitors click on the ad it just goes to their homepage and this is wrong. You want them to go to a special page created to generate more business.
You can use landing pages for Postcards, Facebook Ads, and any other marketing tactic you are targeting. For an example, if you are doing a Special On Car Interior Cleaning and you’re sending out Postcards about that then put the Link to the Landing Page that you’ve created for that not just your Home Page. People don’t want to search for things is the bottom line.
The Bottom is an Example of a Landing Page that tells you the offer and gets to the point. Obviously, you’d want your logo big and bold as well as a phone number and other business info.
Landing Pages that Focus On SEO
Remember that pesky “Over-Optimization Penalty”? Yeah, think about that for a second. When creating hidden landing pages on your current site you are risking the chance of this happening. Basically, the old tactic was people would make hidden pages for every town they serviced. They’d blanket the page with their keywords for example, “Carpet Cleaning Missoula MT” over and over again. So, when Google released the Penguin Penalty it hammered down on sites that did this because it was spammy and didn’t offer relevant content. A lot of people would actually use the same content over and over again on different pages with different cities targeted. I know there’s this big argument about duplicate content but the fact is we go by Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and to us that’s a no-brainer. Follow Google’s Guidelines and you won’t get a penalty, pretty simple really?
Duplicate Content: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en
Original Content: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66361?hl=en
Below is an Example of a page that is Over-Optimized, you can clearly see the content is poor and this site is using their keywords over and over again:
Well, I hope that answered some questions. Stick to using Landing Pages for the purpose of PPC/Ad Words and you’ll be golden. Landing Pages for SEO is an old tactic that doesn’t work any more.