The goal of the search engines is to bring you content that is relevant to your query. If you search for “best colleges in North America” the search engines want to bring you results about, you guessed it, the best colleges in North America. Perhaps it will return a listing of colleges ranked in order of reputation or a directory of the top schools in the U.S. or Canada. Whatever results come up, the name of the game is relevance.
Given this simple fact, it’s amazing how many websites do not strive for a highly relevant and optimized website landing page. Once a visitor lands on your site, what they see (in the search engine results page) should be exactly what they get. Otherwise, they’re liable to bounce out of your website and back to the search engine results.
The higher your website’s bounce rate for a given keyword phrase, the more likely your rankings are going to slip for that keyword. The goal is to get visitors to stay on your website and be enticed to dig deeper into your navigational structure and, ultimately, purchase your products or services. And it all begins with the landing page.
Landing page optimization, whether for an SEO or PPC campaign, is a very important part of the optimization process. The landing page copy and web design elements should reflect the keyword query. In natural search engine optimization, this means selecting a related theme of keywords and optimizing the page for those keywords. A Google Adwords PPC landing page should also be highly customized to match the keyword query, although these campaigns also have the flexibility to experiment with different formats of landing pages or create dynamic content for geo-specific locations.
Whether you are optimizing for SEO or PPC, your homepage is the most important landing page on your website. This is the page where you want to use your most relevant and competitive keywords. Another way to think of it is this: If you had to describe your business using just one or two words, what would they be? Create compelling content that highlights your top keywords and you’ll be well on your way to creating a winning landing page.
Ready to learn more? Contact us at 1-877-Rank-321.
