Here's a fact: the majority of small to mid-size B2B companies in the world are operating with far too few landing pages.
Sure, they all have the classic "Contact Us" page with a form, but that's NOT a true landing page. Your "Contact Us" page will only help you for those prospects that are ready to talk, meaning they've reached the bottom of the sales funnel or jumped right to an equivalent level of readiness.
But what about leads that aren't ready to raise their hand signaling they're ready to buy? How do prospects visiting your site convert and self-identify at the top of the funnel? To capture those leads, you need landing pages.
When it comes to your online marketing efforts, the number of high-performing landing pages in your arsenal directly impacts the number of leads you capture on a monthly basis. In fact, companies that go from having only 10 landing pages to 15 landing pages see a 55% increase in leads.
These may be pages for downloading an eBook on a subject you know is a common pain point for your ideal prospect, a case study on how you helped a customer of yours with a specific challenge, or for a detailed white paper on data your team has compiled that would be of value to your prospects. The key is to make these enticing offers gated, requiring that a visitor fill out a contact form in exchange for that content, giving you the opportunity to follow up with them.
As you create more of these lead attraction pages, here are 5 ways to ensure they're found in online search by your ideal sales prospects.
The number one component of SEO that landing pages (and all other website pages) factor into is your page title. When a user conducts a search, page titles always compete for the user's attention, so yours needs to be the best at getting users' attention. First, assess what problem or question your landing page addresses for the prospect as they're searching for a solution or answer. Then, write a page title that grabs their attention while also matching the long-tail keyword they're likely searching for.
If you're smart when naming the downloadable content piece tied to the landing, the piece title itself may work well as the page title, but they certainly don't have to be the same. Regardless of your choice, pick your words wisely since page titles over 70 characters get cut off in search engine results.
Page descriptions (also referred to as meta descriptions) supposedly don't have the influence in Google's ranking algorithm that page titles do, but they are crucial in helping to sell your page to users viewing the search results. Your goal should be to write a concise and compelling page description that's hard to ignore and drives users to click through to your page. See the example here.
For additional advice on writing better page descriptions read this post.
Although a landing page should be concise and direct in its message to ensure you keep the attention of the visitor, don't go too light on the amount of copy you write. With any web page, the actual page content is key in helping the page get found in organic search and appear valuable to search engines when their algorithm is ranking various pages.
The use of bullet points in your body copy (in place of longer blocks of copy) can help to keep the content scannable for the user, and for shorter articles, they help ensure you have enough content to fill out the page.
It's amazing how many companies overlook this, but for every landing page you create, you should make sure they're designed to be easily shareable via social media and across email platforms. As you begin to attract more and more traffic to these lead-converting pages, people will see firsthand how valuable your content is, and they'll want to share it with their own network. So, go ahead and give them the option to share it by adding social sharing buttons and linking opportunities. These small assets enhance your marketing in big ways by making it as easy as a single click for users to promote your page.
From a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective, social sharing also increases the credibility of your landing pages in the eyes of Google, which sees each LinkedIn share, Facebook like, and tweet as votes that your content is worthy of being ranked higher in search results. Higher rankings will result in more traffic to your pages and more leads!
Another way to secure votes of credibility for SEO is getting other websites to link to your landing page, especially if it's new and original content that has value to those in your industry. Trade publications in your industry are a great place to start looking for opportunities to build links back to your page. Since publications are constantly looking for content to feed to their readers—and usually have credible sites themselves—many companies have huge success gaining links from publication sites. If you can make a compelling case that your latest eBook, whitepaper, or other forms of content is a high-caliber piece, they may just decide to mention it in a relevant online article or include it in a roundup of resources they're sharing.
You'll especially increase your chances of earned media opportunities like this if you can tailor your new content updates to industry publications' editorial calendars.
If you're currently sitting with one landing page to your name, and it's a "Contact Us" page, don't fret. Start with any existing content that you can, and repurpose it to create quick lead-converting content offers to sit behind forms on landing pages. You can also create bottom-of-the-funnel landing pages for things like free assessments, consultations, and demonstrations—depending on the product or service your company has to offer. After you get started, the next task is to make a content plan to add additional landing pages on at least a monthly basis until you get a solid inventory of pages working for you 24/7, attracting and converting leads for your sales pipeline.
