So your site is ranking #1 for your industry’s top keyword?  You may be tempted to forget about SEO, but don’t be fooled: there is still plenty of work to be done!  In a few posts to follow I’ll review some activities you can perform on an ongoing basis to make the most of your SEO efforts.  One of these such activities is landing page optimization.

SEO tends to focus on increasing the quantity of traffic to a website.  Through landing page optimization–that is, making adjustments to key entry pages to improve the user experience–we can actually increase the value of the traffic gained through SEO.  Here’s how.

1. Identify your most popular landing page.  Start with baby steps and identify the landing page that attracts the most organic search traffic.  If you’re using Google Analytics, turn on the “Search Traffic” segment and view the “Landing Pages” report under “Content.”

Here’s an example from Searchability’s analytics.  Our blog article about Facebook ads is clearly our big winner.

2. Determine your audience’s intent.  The best place to start is by looking at the actual keywords/phrases that your visitors typed before they arrived at your page (in Google Analytics, it’s the “Keywords” report under “Traffic”).  Are they looking for an answer to a question?  Do they need a product or service?

In the case of our Searchability example, we see a number of keywords driving traffic to the landing page.  Interestingly, many of the keywords are formed as questions (i.e. “cpm or cpc on facebook?”).  Our audience is looking for advice on how to implement a successful Facebook ad campaign or improve their existing campaign.

3. Analyze your page.  Could your landing page offer a more complete solution to your visitor’s problem?  Could it more effectively encourage your visitors to become customers?

Back to our example: what if we modified our landing page to include a mention of Searchability’s social media management services?  While many of the article readers may intend to manage their own Facebook ad campaign, others may be overwhelmed after their research, and may ultimately prefer the idea of delegating their social media campaign to a specialist.

4. Implement and observe. Put some of your optimization ideas into action and observe whether they succeed.  For you, “success” could mean a number of things: less phone calls to customer support, more widgets sold, more Diggs.  It just depends on what your objectives are.

We’re working on practicing what we preach.  If you go to our article on Facebook ad bidding, you’ll notice that we’ve made a small change for the time being.  Once we can get it in the development queue, we plan on adding a form on this page, giving a reader the opportunity to contact us without even leaving the page.  Any ideas on other changes we might make to this page to better-promote our social media management services?

Make the most of your SEO investment; optimize your landing pages!

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