In other words, old content and offers you've created months -- even years -- ago has a huge potential to continue generating new leads now and in the future. Below are eight tips to optimizing your landing pages for organic traffic and lead generation. Landing Page SEO Best Practices Create a short but keyword-optimized page title. Search engines generally only show the first 60 characters in search results, and your page title doesn't need to be the full title of the content or offer you're promoting. The URL of our landing page is its next-most important on-page SEO element. Your URL helps communicate even more information to search engines about the content on the page. If someone is searching for "lead generation," you want to make sure they find your /lead-generation/ page and not necessarily one of the other, more specific pages. For example, If the landing page is promoting an event, for which you want people to register, consider the fact that many people might be searching for snapshots of this event -- and therefore their search is taking place in Google Images. Well, because it's so difficult for search engines to "read" visual content on a webpage, many search engines take clues about what an image contains from its file name and the alt text you provide. The most important thing search engines consider when ranking a given page is whether or not other people on the internet are vouching for that piece of content by linking back to it.
One of the great things about inbound marketing is that your content keeps paying dividends over time, long after it was originally promoted.
Often, here at HubSpot, we discover that as much as 90% of the new leads we generate each month actually converted on offers we didn’t create or actively promote that month. Furthermore, up to 70% of new leads have come from offers we hadn’t touched in over three months.
That’s a pretty nice spot to be in, don’t you think?
What if the campaigns you’re working on this month were still generating leads for you six months later? What about three years later?
Similar to the offers we create, we here at HubSpot have also found that more than 65% of the leads we generate from our blog each month come from older articles that weren’t published in the last six months.
In other words, old content and offers you’ve created months — even years — ago has a huge potential to continue generating new leads now and in the future. (Doesn’t inbound marketing rock?)
SEO and Lead Generation
The content you’re creating now shouldn’t only consider your current campaigns and goals; it should also be optimized to generate leads months and years into the future.
But how do you make sure your content is getting found and generating leads long after you’ve stopped promoting it through channels like email, calls-to-action, and social media? The same way you’d make sure of it on a blog post: by optimizing it for search engines.
Organic search traffic is considered the most consistent source of quality leads across all the traffic channels available to you. At times, it’s up to seven times more likely to convert a visitor than a traffic source you paid for. Why?
I’m sure you already know that millions of people turn to search engines every day to solve their problems. About two-thirds of the search traffic we see coming into HubSpot.com is from non-branded terms like “lead generation” and “marketing software” — both of which are viable keywords for which to optimize landing pages that can offer people more information on these topics.
People are looking for answers to their problems, and they are finding our content. And for us, having web pages that rank well for these terms generates thousands of new leads for us each and every month, without any additional effort on our part.
That’s why it’s so critically important to keep SEO best practices in mind whenever you’re creating a new piece of content or offer. Because doing the right things now will pay dividends long into the future.
Below are eight tips to optimizing your landing pages for organic traffic and lead generation.
Landing Page SEO Best Practices
- Create a short but keyword-optimized page title.
- Structure your landing page URL correctly.
- Create a heading tag that matches the page title.
- Write a clear and direct meta description.
- Optimize the title. (wait, what?)
- Use structured data to qualify for rich snippets.
- Be careful with how many form fields you have.
- Have a link-building strategy.
When looking to optimize your website for lead generation, landing pages are especially great targets, since a high-ranking landing page will almost certainly drive new leads for you each month. After all, that’s what landing pages are for: to help the people who are already looking for your information actually find it in a portable, downloadable format.
Let’s walk through some of the most important parts of a landing page that you should be focusing on from an SEO standpoint so you can start turning your landing pages into long-term conversion points for your business.
1. Create a short but keyword-optimized page title.
The most important element for any on-page SEO is the title of the page, according to data from Moz. The page title is the description of the webpage that shows up at the top of your browser (or in the tabs if you have more than one open in your browser window):
Page titles are one of the most effective ways to indicate what the content on a given page is to search engines, and they’re also a key component to consider when following SEO best practices. Specifically, follow these rules when creating page titles for your landing pages:
Keep it short.
Search engines generally only show the first 60 characters in search results, and your page title doesn’t need to be the full title of the content or offer you’re promoting. Instead, focus on keywords by removing any unnecessary words. Just be sure it’s also still easy to read and clear to a human what the content of the page is all about.
Include high-quality keywords first.
Search engines place more emphasis on keywords that appear closer to the left of the page title. Because this is the case, you should start your page title with your most important keywords first, and include your less important ones later.
Use vertical pipes to separate concepts and phrases.
This is a good best practice since it helps search engines break apart multi-word phrases and figure out which keywords go together. For example, you’ll notice that we use a vertical pipe in the page title of this blog (“Internet Marketing Blog | HubSpot”).
Don’t include your company’s name in every single page title.
You should aim to optimize your landing pages for long-tail search visitors who are simply seeking information on a topic and haven’t necessarily heard of your company. Don’t worry, even if you leave out your company’s name, you can still rank well for branded searches because of your root domain name and the rest of the page authority your site has built up. There’s no need to waste valuable SEO real estate on things you’ll already rank for.
2. Structure your landing page URL correctly.
The URL of our landing page is its next-most important on-page SEO element. Your URL helps communicate even more information to search engines about the content on the page. Furthermore, URLs also convey site structure and how this page fits among the other content on your site.
The rules for landing page URLs are actually similar to page titles:
Keep it short.
Most search engines only show about 65 characters in the URL portion, and some of these will be taken up by your domain name (e.g. http://www.hubspot.com…), leaving you with only a few dozen characters to work with if you don’t want your URLs truncated in search results.
Use slashes to separate concepts and phrases.
Ideally, each level of depth in your URL has its own page that visitors can check out. So, for example, if you’re promoting an offer about generating leads through…
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