Managing SEO and design requirements on landing pages

Every page of your website is important and needs to be designed and optimised with care. However, it is particularly crucial that your landing pages are fully optimised and beautifully designed. They are designed to be the first part of your site that most web users will see, meaning that you have to ensure they occupy a prominent position in the SERPs and that they can hold the interest of ordinary viewers. There are several unique challenges associated with designing and optimising landing pages. We’ll teach you how to tackle them in today’s blog.

1. Balancing the need for brevity with the demand for keywords

Search engine optimisation demands that you use keywords, which means including a reasonable amount of textual content on your landing pages. However, ordinary web users prefer brevity, as too much text can be overwhelming when it’s presented on a landing page. Balancing these two conflicting requirements can be tricky, but it’s not impossible.

We recommend using video content and including a transcript. The video content can introduce prospective customers to your business and content, which search engines scan the transcript for valid keywords. Web users aren’t overwhelmed by videos in the same way they are by walls of text, and it’s easy to include the transcript in a discreet way. For example, you can put it in a drop-down description beneath the video. If viewers want to see it, they can click on the drop-down description and reveal the whole thing. If not, it can remain hidden. What’s more, video content is fantastic for SEO. Search engines reward pages that use multiple content types.

2. Guiding viewers further into your site

Getting web users to click links that lead further into your site should be treated as a design goal and an SEO goal. Search engines tend to reward pages that encourage customers to click further into their associated sites. Furthermore, getting viewers to click further into your site is vital if you want to convert them into customers. We recommend that you only present viewers with a few links that relate directly to the products or services being promoted by the landing page. It may seem counterintuitive, but you don’t want to overload your prospective customers with too many links. It’s better to keep their path to your site as simple and easy-to-follow as possible. Placing a few links in a prominent location on the page is always better than deploying multiple links in a hard-to-follow jumble.

3. Keeping it clean

It may be tempting to include as many features as possible for SEO purposes. However, clean, minimalist landing pages are better at drawing in prospective customers. If you have followed the advice in points 1 and 2, you shouldn’t need to include lots of different features in order to optimise your landing pages. Ergo, we recommend aiming for simple, minimalist pages.

If you would like any more help designing and optimising landing pages, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. Here at Excalibur Digital, we’re experts in SEO website design. More importantly, we’re always happy to share our expertise with our valued clients.