What is a Landing Page?

A Landing Page is also called “Squeeze Pages” or sometimes “Lead Pages”. There are lots of diverse explanations that float around the web about landing pages.

It is the initial impression a customer finds when they visit your website. Also, a destination page/single web page on a website that warm-up potential clients. A web page is not necessarily a landing page. The landing page is usually uncluttered and has a form solely for capturing visitors’ data. It’s a valuable tool to drive traffic from search engine results pages (SERP). Mostly landing pages are being used for SEM campaigns such as Google Ads campaigns to draw particular audience example to download your eBook. When a user clicks on an online marketing call, they usually land on a Landing Page.

Furthermore, landing pages are being created in email-campaigns as well, where the user is being led to a specific landing page created for that email campaign only. The quality of a Landing Page determines the success of an SEM or SEO campaign as the user will decide either to engage on that page (e. g. buy a product) or bounce off. 

SEO Landing Pages

Ever wondered why Landing Pages are applicable to SEO? Apart from improving the site ranking, you aim at converting the visitor. In the SEO world, any page on a website that has been created in order to capture traffic and is based on keyword research is considered a landing page. A blog post for instance which has been solely created to get traffic by providing interesting and valuable content for the reader can also be considered a landing page. Usually, SEO landing pages have more content such as text and images, than SEM Landing Pages. Organic pages can only rank higher when they are able to provide quality and valuable articles. An SEO landing page can’t have too many CTA elements as it would be considered spam by search engines such as Google. In order to get ranked higher, an SEO landing page has to provide something that will take away the customer’s pain.

If users land on an SEO Landing Page and bounce off too quickly because the content is not relevant or interesting, as a result, the page will rank lower and eventually disappear from the organic search results. That’s why many SEO Landing Pages focus more on one strong, clear and quality CTA rather than an advertisement. This article, for example, is the perfect example of an SEO Landing Page. Frankly, any SEO focused landing page aims to optimize a user’s experience particularly when they visit the page for the first time.

But what about the conversions?

The Conversion Rates on SEO Landing pages are much lower than for SEM as many users are more or less interested in reading articles to educate themselves rather than in the product being advertised. High-quality SEO Landing Page generates traffic absolutely free. An SEO Landing Page that creates traffic helps to improve overall site rank on the search engine result pages.

Essentially, SEO Landing Pages should have CTA elements in place to offer the opportunity to convert the user. As SEO Landing Pages create much more and especially free traffic, it would be a shame if opportunities to convert the user were missed.

SEM Landing Pages

An SEM Landing Page usually provides less or no articles but rather filled with CTA buttons, supported by trust elements such as reviews, testimonials, badges, prices, and many more. As it is paid advertisement, it doesn’t have to fear being ranked down on the search engine result pages. Providing high-quality content or/and articles is not the priority. Instead, the purpose of an SEM landing page is to convert the user as soon as possible. That’s why SEM Landing Pages look more like “salesy” so to speak.

What only a few people know:

While on SEO Landing Pages the search engine such as Google determines its quality to decide whether to rank it high or not. It turns out SEM Landing Pages are subject to quality check by Google as well. It seems odd that Google would care about the SEM Landing Page as advertisers pay a good price. However, it’s not that easy. Even though you pay for your ads, Google doesn’t want the users to be misled in any way as Google deems it important to show high-quality ads that lead to high-quality landing pages.

Yes, Google indexes the Landing Page you have created for your ad and determines if it’s good or not.

That means that your SEM Landing Page has to fulfill the user expectation based on the ad you are showing. Google also will track the success of your SEM Landing Page. If too many users bounce off and don’t convert, Google will show your ad to fewer people as it will assume that your Landing Page is of low quality and more likely a nuisance to the user. Whereas on SEO your ranking position is an indicator of the quality of your Landing page, on SEM it’s called quality score, and can be found on your AdWords Dashboard.

And this is why one of the most important processes during an SEM or SEO campaign is the wireframing, design and coding of a Landing Page.