A Complete Guide to Creating AWESOME Optimised Landing Pages to Make People Come Back For More

Hannah Thorpe, MD at Verkeer
Landing pages are the first impression of your website. Landing pages should be easy to read, simple, attractive, and have relevant keywords and Call To Actions. But that isn’t all.

To learn more about landing pages and first impressions, we have Hannah Thorpe, the Director of Growth Strategy at Found, speak with us today. Found is an award-winning growth marketing agency in London. Hannah has managed successful online campaigns for multimillion brands and has over 5 years of search experience and expertise. Today, she tells us more about landing pages and how YOU can make YOUR landing page AWESOME!

Making Your Landing Page AWESOME

Let’s discuss all the factors that play a crucial part when it comes to optimizing a web landing page:

What makes a good landing page?

A good landing page needs to:

  • Have a great user experience and encourage them to take action
  • Should be super visible to both new and existing customers
  • Should be attractive
  • Solve problems without being too ‘sale-sy’
  • Answer a user’s exact questions, clearly
  • Be easy to find, exactly when someone needs it
  • Be uniquely useful
  • Be compelling and more specific than your competitors
  • Use the same language as you do to describe a problem
  • Be indisputably accurate

That isn’t all, we also need search engines to like it!

So, how does one make his website optimized to meet all the above-mentioned criteria points? Let’s go back to the basics!

Back to the Basics

The first lesson is to know the difference between a landing page and a webpage. A webpage is any page on the website, whereas a landing page is the page which tells your user about what you do, your story, and has relevant CTAs.

When it comes to SEO, it isn’t just about stuffing keywords.

It is important to know that the SEO of a landing page is determined from the following factors:

  • Overall site health
  • Use of keywords
  • Volume of content
  • Speed
  • Relevancy to the query
  • Number of links
  • Structured content
  • User engagement

And so on.

It is important to know that Google doesn’t care about you. It cares about the user. You are responsible for presenting the best resources to your viewer, with a specific problem, as compared to the other pages in the index. It is important to do it multiple times instead of once.

Creating a Landing Page Process

When it comes to creating a landing page, there are 5 main rules involved in the process:

1) Know what YOU want

It is important to remember that you are:

  • Trying to attract completely new users
  • Looking to covert users who already know you
  • Want people to remember your brand
  • Want users to get more information about you
  • Want to achieve multiple things on one page

According to Hannah, here is how one should do it:

  • Trying to attract completely new users —> Prioritize meeting SEO best practice for generic terms
  • Looking to convert users who already know you —-> Use clear CTA’s that don’t allow much browsing
  • Want people to remember your brand —> Put clear brand USPs in front of the page to solve problems
  • Want users to get more information about you —> Focus on user experience and well-linked content

2) Know what YOUR USERS want

It doesn’t matter what YOU want to achieve. No one cares about that, including Google.

Know what your USER wants to achieve on your site.

For this, think about what kind of phrases your user typically uses when searching for content like yours.

Then think about what combination of words should you be using to make your site resonate with their phrases.

Understand whether phrases are

  • Informational
  • Transactional
  • Navigational

It is important to know when and how to use these phrases.

For example, you cannot communicate in narrative phrases to people who want to buy.

It is important to understand whether phrases are

  • Comparative
  • Evaluative
  • Directive

Let’s consider a practical example for a better understanding. If a user types in the phrase best laptops 2020, then it will be a comparative search because it is general and demands multiple types and models of laptops.

If a user types in the phrase best laptops 2020 singular, then that would be an evaluative search.

On the other hand, if a user types in best Dell laptops 2020 then that would be a directive search.

3) Focus on the Structure

It is important to focus on different aspects of your landing page that constitute its overall architecture or structure, such as:

  • Page title
  • Meta description
  • Headings (h1,h2,h3’s) (It is ideal to have one h1 on a single page)
  • Clear content formatting

4) Think about what’s next

Once you’re done with the steps mentioned above, you might want to start thinking about the next steps you might want to take.

  • First of all, don’t let your user get lost on your page.
  • Use strategic tools to find your frustrated clickers, the highlighters, and the ones losing their way. Find a way to reduce that.
  • Give clear instructions on the action you want them to take
  • Give them the experience they are expecting
  • Ask them for feedback.

5) Monitor, learn, and repeat

Use effective tools to measure and monitor your:

  • Content drops.
  • Competitor change
  • The number of days for a new landing page to fall to half of its peak performance
  • How long the landing page remains valuable to the site before becoming dormant

Lastly…..FREEBIES!!!

Here are some freebies from Hannah to our lovely audience:

Reach out to Hannah for more info on twitter: @hannahjthorpe

Or email her at:  hannah.thorpe@found.co.uk

Hannah Thorpe Profile:

This is actually the third time Hannah has spoken at The Marketing Meetup – having already inspired audiences in London and Norwich, although she is also a seasoned speaker having also helped audiences at BrightonSEO and many others. There were a couple of things I admired about Hannah when seeing her speak. The first is her absolute expertise – when you’re in her company you can’t help but think: you’re an expert in something I don’t know anything about yet! The second however is her willingness to share this and try to bring others to her level: exactly the type of people we want speaking to the TMM audience. We should also make sure to say at this stage that Hannah has been a great advocate for TMM since her speaking at the events – so a big thank you!