Every Page Can Be A Landing Page – by Tony Burke.
As a student of Internet Marketing as well as Digital Marketing, I have been witnessing how several of our clients pages are starting to rank now, when they used to battle just to get the home page showing up. Do you want to know the secret?
It is in fact relatively simple – give the search engines what they want.
Forget what you think you know and have been told about Google. Focus on doing the small things right on every page of your website. SEO is still a minefield, and most SEO companies will try and convince you to focus on your home page, stuff it with keywords and then try and get hundreds of meaningless backlinks. The fact of the matter is running a digital agency means I get to see the results of several online marketing tactics first hand, and then offer further solutions to our clients based on a wide variety of data. Knowledge Is Power.
For example, did you know the Google keyword planner, which is a part of Adwords, is a good resource for gathering information on potential future blog posts? Did you also know that using a Hashtag on a Google+ post will show relevance and increase organic search follow through? You probably did not, because is it not this kind of information that SEO companies will want to share with you.
So let’s assume you have a website, and the person/people who built it did not follow through with a full SEO roadmap or plan for you. This is not surprising, seeing as how most websites are built under the “penny wise – pound foolish” model from both the designers and clients. Even if that is not the case, most people make assumptions that once a website is built that mass population will come flocking. The ‘build it and they will come’ model actually only worked once, and that was in the movies. The truth is with over 500 new websites registered and built every hour, how can you expect to create something and have it work on your behalf if you abandon it. In our field, if you leave something alone, it will actually go backwards.
In my opinion what’s worse is that some digital companies will build a poor website, then charge €500 a month for Google Adwords, which is completely unnecessary. The fact that this seems to be encouraged and the only way forward for some is even more confusing for me. Sure, Adwords have their place, and definitely should be used within certain niches, and there is no other way around it. PPC in general can be worth it, but only when it is measured, transparent and provable that it increases ROI versus the alternative.
Every page can be a landing page if you go ahead and build a website with a plan. Websites should be connected to some form of analytics system, webmaster system, tracking system and a way to measure your search results. There are many ways to do this without spending a fortune either with management plans or with SEO programs. Your best bet is to link as many of the optional Google tools at your disposal, and learn how to use them. Honestly, within 20 or so hours, you could have it all set up and be ready for the future knowing your destiny is in your hands.
The main thing you need to do is focusing on getting your website indexed with the search engines the proper way. This takes time and a small bit of experience, because if you get your index wrong, it can take months to correct, and cause you valuable organic results in the meantime.
Once correctly indexed, and verified with Google My Business, you can use the Google tools to preview your SERP listing, and learn from that how you can show multiple page listings for one search result. That is the first step in showing how every page can be a landing page. Once you know which selection of your pages are shown, you can then focus on optimising each of those pages in terms of appearance and SEO compliance to encourage clicks to these pages as well as clicks to your home page.
