Top 5 SEO Landing Page Best Practices for 2021

The debate about whether or not landing pages are useful for SEO has been going on for a few years now. And it makes perfect sense! As digital marketers, we create so many landing pages to generate demand from paid media, email marketing programs, webinars, etc. At some point, all of us start wondering what needs to be done for our landing pages to begin capturing the organic search traffic.

We’re approaching the end of 2020 with Google making some very significant updates to the way they’re indexing and ranking the content. Based on the latest, I’ve put together a quick summary of the top 5 best and worst practices for SEO landing pages that you should consider in 2021.

Are landing pages good for SEO?

If you’re like me and you hate vague answers to very specific questions, here’s the definitive answer to this question. There are certain cases when landing pages are great for SEO and certain scenarios when they can be really harmful.

What landing pages are great for SEO?

1. Landing pages with unique content, not just copy and paste from your or someone else’s website. It doesn’t mean that all of the content must be unique. Google gives you some flexibility here, and as long as 80-85% of your content is unique, your landing pages will benefit your SEO.
2. Landing pages with the essential SEO elements, such as Page Title and Meta Description. You also need to make sure that both page title and description are unique to your website. By the way, out of those two, Google is considering Page Title more critical compared to Meta Description. So, if some of your pages don’t have Meta Descriptions at all, Google will index your pages without too much problem.‍
3. Landing pages with supportive SEO elements, such as ALT tags used for all of the graphics. Google is paying attention to ALT Tags, so it’s better to have them in place. However, it’s not like the SEO value of your landing pages will evaporate if they don’t contain any Alt tags. ‍
4. Mobile-friendliness of a landing page is a factor that's becoming more and more important. Remember, Google first indexes the mobile version of your landing page. Therefore you need to have one. The loading speed is also something that gets overlooked frequently. Google needs to make sure that your page will load quickly, even when users’ internet speed is slow.‍
5. Landing pages with both content and URLs optimized adequately for specific keywords will contribute to your SEO strategy big time. There are plenty of articles you can find online about how to optimize your content and URL for particular keywords. I’ll mention the critical recipes for successful SEO landing pages:

• Create engaging content and sprinkle in the keywords. Remember, valuable content comes first. Trivial and pointless blurbs packed with keywords will not get you far.
• Over-spamming your content with keywords is dead. Read a few articles on SEO best practices for creating optimized content – you’ll learn that there’s a fine line between a properly optimized content piece and an over-optimized one.
• Select the main keyword and put it in H1 and URL. Here's a practical example: The H1 of this article contains the keyword: "seo landing page". Hence, I've made sure that the URL contains the same keyword: "/seo-landing-page"

Over-spamming your content with keywords is dead.

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What landing pages are bad for SEO?

1. Landing pages with duplicate content – where the content has been copied and pasted from your or someone else’s website. There’s nothing wrong with those landing pages. In fact, they could be performing very well from the lead generation perspective. Just make sure to block them from indexing. That way, they will not hurt your SEO strategy.
2. Landing pages without the essential SEO elements, such as Page Title and Meta Description will get Google's crawler suspicious of your content in general. If you have many pages like these in your domain, your overall search performance will suffer.
3. Landing pages without supportive SEO elements, such as ALT tags used for all of the graphics.
4. Landing pages that are not mobile-friendly will not hold up to Google’s high standards of 2021.
5. Landing pages with over-optimized content and URLs won’t perform well from the Organic Search perspective.

To sum up, certain SEO landing pages can add value to your content marketing strategy. At the end of the day, you have complete control over-indexing, and you’re the ones who’s either allowing Google and other search engines to index your landing pages or not. In 2021 Google will for sure release even more updates, so I’ll try to keep up and update this article accordingly. You might want to bookmark this page if the topic of SEO landing pages is of any interest to you.