Take some time to investigate landing pages and you’ll see that close to 100% of results will be talking about using stand alone web pages to drive conversions coming from email or sponsored listings. The purpose of these landing pages is to “Buy Today!” and “Sign Up Now!” –  to convert every visitor into a buyer. Often these pages don’t even link to the main website. Its entire reason to exist is to sell.

I want to talk about the other kind of landing page – the kind that is built for search engines. The purpose of these pages is to earn a high organic ranking for a specific product or service. This gets you click throughs from organic search engine results that lead directly to your website.

Because Landing Page Topics are Targeted, They Rank Well

Imagine you run a hair salon and under your “Services” page you list all the cuts and styles you specialize in. This serves you fine for customers looking for “Hair Salon Services” as their search terms. But what about people searching on “up do” for their upcoming formal event? If you have a page dedicated to everything you’d ever want to know about up do’s, you have a shot at pulling in those customers.

This is what the experts mean when they say Google loves great content. Position yourself as an expert, not through empty claims, but by informing the world about your knowledge area.

You Can’t Cheat The Keywords

You can throw as many keywords as you want into a random paragraph in the footer of your website but Google sees you. Google looks at the context around your keywords and when it sees a full page dedicated to useful original content on one keyword topic it says, “Hot damn! That’s what I’m talking about!” A well written landing page will always outrank a keyword storm.

Don’t Forget About Making the Sell

Just because the purpose of our landing pages is to inform (and therefore rank) doesn’t mean they doesn’t have to sell as well. Your landing pages need to include call outs about buying the product or service from you. Putting these in the sidebar is ideal. The up do page for our hair salon could have call outs like, “Up Do’s in Only 1 Hour”, “Call Us Today”, “Walk Ins Welcome”, or “Call For a Free Consultation”.

Other Uses: Landing Pages for PR and Social Media Campaigns

Try writing a landing page on a high profile project or client and create online buzz by driving traffic to it from your PR and social media campaigns. Not only can the page rank for your keywords, but it gives you more content to Tweet and Facebook about!

You, The Expert

Remember, it’s not so much about ranking on page 1 of Google or converting every visit into a sale. It’s all part of the bigger marketing build. You want to show every visitor that YOU are the industry expert, the go-to guy, the one to watch. Landing pages show the world why you are an industry God and why everyone else is just a hack.