Traditionally, the homepage was seen as the best page to inform users of everything that your business provides, whether it be your products, services or features available.
Conventional web design would have dictated that designers focus most of their attention on their homepage design, and for digital marketing teams to focus their primary keywords on the homepage with the objective of increasing visits and boosting SEO.
Since Google’s release of the Hummingbird update way back now (in 2013), the search engine has seemingly become a lot more powerful and intelligent in understanding the nature of search queries and through providing highly relevant results to a broader range of terms. The approach nowadays needs to be to attract visitors to internal landing pages of the website, not just the homepage. The chart below highlights the need to build websites for real people (customers), not just for search engines.
Source – http://moz.com/blog/topics-people-over-keywords-rankings-whiteboard-friday
Attracting visitors to the internal pages of the website directly from Google should ensure that visitors to the website have content that is relevant to their search query.
Conventional content creation would have focused more around web copy tailored to fit in as many singular keywords as possible to influence keyword rankings. Content has to be about something, and relevant to a page being delivered to the end user, a potential customer. The idea of concepts over keywords is a simple one. For example, if you type into Google “films about children that shrink” you can guess which film would appear; but would you expect the search engine to show “Honey I Shrunk the Kids” in first position? No keywords were used, just the concept relating to the film. The same principle applies with content creation, as high quality web copy which is relevant to the message of the page will attract the desired audience.
A page with high quality content will attract visits primarily from synonyms, long-tail (jargon?) or semantic variations; all built naturally in within content, which work a lot better for driving traffic than working on a just a handful of keywords. The issue has often been that, singular keywords are often too broad, too competitive and don’t convert on a high enough level; whereas high quality content (copy) and web pages do.
Smart content creation results in pages being found for a broad range of search terms, rather than singular keywords. There therefore needs to be enough web copy across a website to support landing page visibility.
The landing page reflects the page visited directly from the search engine. Having landing pages across a website can assist in directing the user to the most relevant page associated with the search query, without the need to land onto the homepage every time and search for the page.
The homepage of a website typically commands the most page authority across a website; however website authority is dictated by each and every page of the website. Strengthening the level of optimisation across the top level pages of the website can firmly contribute to increasing your website’s strength; and search position on Google.
Key benefits of landing pages
Allowing for enough space on top level pages throughout the site for modules which allow for content and images is essential for allowing valuable top tier website pages to act as landing pages.
The following factors also should also be considered:
Increasing website authority should be high on the agenda at any organisation, and landing pages play an integral role in contributing towards this. Not only can internal web pages become more appealing from a content perspective; but also for SEO and in terms of supporting end users of your website. Through pulling visitors directly from Google onto relevant landing pages, this helps to accelerate user journeys by providing them answers to their query through Google, rather than hoping that your homepage will do the job.
Do you require SEO support optimising your content for Google? Get in touch.