Landing pages are usually optimized for conversion, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be optimized for SEO.
An SEO-optimized Landing page can rank high in Google and this means more traffic and more conversions.
In this article, I will explain what SEO Landing pages are and give you a checklist to make sure your Landing pages are optimized not only for conversion but also for search engines.
What is a landing page?
Landing page is the first page that you want users to visit when they visit your site.
For many websites, the Landing page is the homepage, because this is the page users visit when they enter the domain name into the browser.
In the situation where you run a marketing campaign, a landing page is the page you want users to see when they click on ads (internal or external) from your campaigns.
Landing pages serve a specific purpose. Normally, it does not have all the elements of a normal page but it is designed and structured in a way that leads users to take a specific action (submit a form, purchase a product or sign up for a service. , etc.)
Optimize SEO for Landing Page to do what?
SEO Landing pages have all the characteristics of a regular landing page, i.e. they are primarily optimized for conversion, but they are also SEO friendly.
As we will see below, optimizing your landing page for search engines is not that difficult, especially if you have an SEO mindset.
Where should you NOT optimize your landing page?
Having said that, there are cases where landing page optimization is worthless and time and effort wasted.
For example, if you plan to develop a landing page for a short-term campaign or to test an idea, you can skip the SEO part because this page doesn't exist forever.
In most cases, SEO works well on landing pages:
- Increase your chances of ranking higher for the search terms you want
- It is very good for branding
- It enhances the user experience because the SEO guidelines can make the page visitors more friendly.
13 steps to optimize your landing page for SEO (complete)
Right below are the steps to optimize SEO landing page, we will go step by step:
1. Publish the landing page to your own domain name
This is the first step to take and is very important.
To gain from any SEO benefit, landing pages should be published under your own domain name.
If you are using a third party service to host your landing page, your chances of achieving any rankings are minimal or impossible.
Many third party service providers offer the option to publish their landing page under their own subdomain, for example: vietnetgroup.company.site
Good SEO people know this is not good.
A good way to do SEO is to publish your landing pages under your own domain name, this is ten-landingpage.vietnetgroup.vn or even better as a subdirectory of your website, i.e. is vietnetgroup.vn/ten-landingpage
Many landing page design units offer this type of custom domain name, which may take a bit of setup cost but that's a good way.
An even better way is to design and host the landing page directly on your website.
For example, if you're on WordPress, you can create a custom page template and apply it on a regular WordPress site.
In this way, the landing page will be part of your website, it will also receive internal links, menus or inherit the full trust of the domain name and especially you save a lot of cost of goods. month to third party vendors.
In addition, having a landing page on your domain increases user trust because users don't have to leave your site and this can help you get more conversions.
So what I recommend is that you follow the options that are beneficial for both SEO and conversion.
2. Optimize your landing page URL
The URL of your landing page must comply with all SEO-friendly URL rules.
In other words, it must:
- Short and accurate - long URLs are confusing for both search engines and users
- Include keywords - Include the keywords you want to target but not keyword stuffing (I talk more about this below)
- All characters are lowercase
- There are no spaces
- Separate words are joined by "-"
The URL of the landing page must be short and easy to remember so that when it is shared in social networks or forums, it means better, more aesthetic.
For example, when you see this URL in a forum or on Facebook or twitter: vietnetgroup.vn/dao-tao-seo.html then you know what this page is about just by reading the url.
Related instructions: What is Slug - Best Slug optimization guide
3. Create a Landing page with HTTPS
A lot of you think it doesn't matter because the way you get most of your traffic is from advertising. You seem to be not very right, at least HTTPS will help you gain more credibility from the user.
Having an SSL attached to your landing pages and website in general, is extremely important.
It is a factor that will help you increase rankings because Google is using https in their ranking algorithm.
In addition, it is an affirmation to tell users that they can trust your website to share their personal information and purchase.
Related instructions: How to switch from http to https
4. Select the keywords you want to rank for
To be able to optimize SEO for any page, you first need to know which keywords you want that page to rank for.
When it comes to SEO landing pages, this task becomes a bit more complicated because SEO keywords need to be noticed with keywords that are already defined on the main page.
It sounds confusing here, let me explain with an example.
For example: You really want to rank for the keyword "How to lose weight" for the landing page, but realize that it's too difficult for a landing page to close the product. You can think of broader words and you are likely to lead the trend like "weight loss tea pack" (in case you sell weight loss tea)
And difficult keywords can leave a page's content on your website. The advantage of landing pages is that you use that page to run ads or display priority on your website, place banners on other websites so the ability for users to remember the key of that landing page is possible.
Related suggestions: 9 How to find topic ideas for content
5. Optimize SEO OnPage for landing page
Once you have a clear idea of the keywords you want the page to rank for, the next step is to add those keywords to your page.
This process is called Onpage SEO and the steps to take are:
Add key keywords in the URL
Go back and review your page URL and make sure you include your main target keyword.
For example, I have a landing page to make a package Website design package, the URL I put is https://www.vietnetgroup.vn/thiet-ke-website.html
Add keywords in your title tags
Every page published on the web has a title tag (
This is not necessarily what is displayed on the page (it's an H1 tag), but what is displayed in the browser and search engine results pages.
In the title tag, you need to include the main keyword or variations of that keyword.
For example, in the landing page CULTURAL of VietNet Group. I have:
Title card: VietNet Corporate Culture - People leading the way
H1 card: CULTURE OF ENTERPRISES
Related instructions: Title tags - SEO friendly title optimization
Add keywords in meta descriptions
Meta descriptions may not be displayed on the page itself, but may be displayed in Search results below your title.
It is important when it comes to SEO, to include relevant keywords in your description and make them compelling to encourage users to click on your snippets and visit your website.
Google doesn't always display the meta descriptions you specify, sometimes it creates a custom description based on the content of the page.
However, you must always optimize the meta descriptions of all your pages.
Add keywords or related words on the main title (H1 tags) and subheadings (H2 and H3 tags)
The first element of a page is the H1 tag.
In most cases, the H1 tag is the same
For example, in my SEO Training Course page,
Title is: SEO Training Course: Basic - Premium - Private: By audience
The H1 card is: Course SEO Training: Basic - Premium - Private
Notice how I use my target keywords in both sections (shown in bold).
A good landing page with different ideas, these should have H2 headers and H3 subheadings.
When designing any page, always try to use hierarchies. On top of the structure, you have H1 (there should be only 1 H1 tag per page), then you can have more H2 and then H3.
Suggest related readings: Optimize tags H1, H2, H3, ... completely for SEO
6. Optimize content for SEO
Another factor to optimize is the actual content of the page. By reading this, we have optimized the title, description and title but you also need to optimize the rest of the content.
Make sure you have text content on the page.
To get started, your landing page needs to have text content on it, not just images or videos. This is very important.
Search engines can understand text content more easily than images or videos.
Depending on the design of the page, you can use sensible ways to add the text content you need for SEO purposes, without breaking your design.
Follow these simple instructions:
On the top try adding a few lines of text content. This may be under your H1 tag (main title).
The purpose of this is to provide both search engines and users with an understanding of the content of the page.
Typically, a landing page with main incentives is displayed on the first screen so that users can see it as soon as they visit the page.
That's okay, you don't have to change your design for the purpose of adding more text on the first screen, but you can do so in the bottom screen position.
Be careful with using hidden display style
Make sure important text is not hidden in tabs. Tabs are very useful, especially on mobile devices, but as a general rule, use them only when necessary.
If you have something important to share with your users (and search engines), don't hide it in Tabs, make it visible on the page. Use Tabs of less important messages.
Add the key related keywords content
Related keywords are phrases that have the same meaning as your target keywords.
So, instead of repeating the same keyword in your text and risk being interpreted as keyword stuffing, you can find and enrich the text using related keyword forms.
Suggestions to read this related article: SEO standard content
7. Optimize images and videos
Landing pages tend to have many images, in the form of images or videos.
On the SEO side, you need to make sure that these elements are inserted into the page in the best way with SEO.
Image SEO
All images need to be optimized with 3 elements:
File name - it's not the biggest SEO signal, but it's good to use meaningful file names. For example, if an image shows a path full of flowers, the file name could be duong-hoa-dep.jpg.
ALT alt text - This is the most important factor for image SEO.
For each image, you need to have a meaningful ALT text. ALT text is displayed in the browser when the image fails to load and is used by search engines to understand what an image is.
When writing your ALT text, try to match the keywords naturally. For example, if you have an image that shows a path full of flowers, the ALT text might be Long road with two beautiful flowers
Caption image - For each image, you can also provide captions. This is the short description that appears below the image. Captions can be similar to ALT texts, with a bit more detail.
For example: Images of a beautiful road with sides full of flowers
SEO Video
If you have videos on your landing page, make sure that:
That video is hosted by a third party like YouTube or Vimeo. This will help you reduce the load very well for your landing page, moreover those video hosting channels are very professional and popular.
Add a schema for each video to give search engine bots more details about your video. You can use JSON-LD scripts as instructed by Google here.
Posts related to this topic in detail: Optimize Images and Videos best for SEO
8. Add structured data markup
Structured data markup is not only available for videos. There are several schemas you can use on your landing page depending on the product or service you are selling.
Schemas can improve the presentation of your search and also help your page rank higher.
Through schemas, you can give search engines more information about what you sell, how much it costs, inventory and lots of other useful information.
Google also detailed instructions and explanations, you can read in the content Google guides their structured data.
9. Optimized for mobile
With Google introducing their content "Google’s first mobile index“The need for a SEO friendly landing page is more important than ever.
To optimize your landing page for mobile devices, ensure the following factors:
- Mobile pages do not have horizontal scrolling.
- Has all the content of the page on the desktop interface
- Fast loading speed.
- No ads or annoying elements for mobile users.
- Watch well on different resolutions.
10. Optimize the speed
The loading speed of a page is a known SEO ranking factor. Fast-loading pages are more likely to rank higher than slower pages.
For landing pages, speed is even more important because various studies have shown the impact of speed on sales and conversions up to 20% better.
To gain the advantage of both good SEO and higher sales, your landing pages should load as quickly as possible.
Some ways to improve page loading speed:
- Use image compression tools to optimize ALL images
- Tools like Optimizilla Image file size can be reduced significantly without quality loss.
- Minimize your CSS and JS
- Use plugin cache
- Use the CDN
- Use a web hosting provider with good SEO elements to host your website and landing page.
- Never add videos directly on your site using 3rd party services like YouTube.
11. Add internal links pointing to the landing page
Now that we've optimized the structure and content of the landing page, it's time to see how you can best promote your pages and improve rankings.
We will consider three areas:
Internal link is a link that points to a page on the same domain, also known as an internal link
You can use internal links to help Google understand the importance of your landing pages.
Pages with the largest number of internal links are considered to be the most valuable pages of your site and this can have a positive impact on your SEO.
What should you do:
- Add a link pointing to the landing page from your homepage
- Add a link pointing to the landing page in the footer and sidebar
- Add links in your blog posts
- Use keywords in Anchor text of internal links to tell Google about the keywords you want a landing page to rank for.
- When used correctly, internal links can help your SEO and also redirect some of your site visits to those pages and this means more conversions.
Related posts are good for you: Internal link and External link - Practice 2 factors best
12. Advertise your landing page and get backlinks
Besides promoting your landing page in internal links, you also need to promote them on the Internet for the purpose of getting backlinks.
High quality backlinks are one of the SEO factors that can greatly affect your rankings.
If you are familiar with offpage SEO practices, you will know that good quality links are hard to come by, especially when it comes to promoting landing pages and sales pages in general.
Webmasters don't like linking to a sales page and this is normal.
The following article I will talk about methods to get these quality backlinks.
13. Use 301 redirects
The main goal of the landing page is to increase conversions. In the process, it's normal to change the content of the page or even create new pages.
Every time you do this, you will lose backlinks, and the trust of the users, the search engine you have built and this is not good for SEO.
What is the solution?
Use 301 redirects every time you create a new landing page for the same product or service.
A 301 redirect instructs search engines to transfer any SEO value from one URL to another.
So any links you have built and rankings will not be lost when you launch your new landing page.
301 redirects may be added to the file .htaccess either on your CMS using a plugin. The syntax is very simple:
Redirect 301 OLD URL NEW URL.
For example, suppose you have a landing page https://domain.com/landing-page-1 and you decide to test a new landing page with the URL https://domain.com/landing-page-2.
301 redirects will look like this:
Redirect 301 / landing-page-1 https://domain.com/landing-page-2.
This way, every page imprint, internal link, social link and backlinks will automatically redirect to your new landing page without generating any broken links and reinforcing it. your SEO efforts.
If you follow the instructions above, you will complete with a landing page optimized for SEO. This means you can get targeted traffic directly to your pages and increase conversions.
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