When you are working on an SEO campaign, there will be a variety of objectives that form part of it. One of those will be to get traffic to specific pages, some of which will be landing pages. However, not every landing page will be the target of organic traffic from search engines as some landing pages might also be being sent traffic from paid advertising campaigns such as pay-per-click.

Some website owners might simply use a single landing page for all of their traffic whether it be SEO generated from search engines, or PPC generated from paid ads, however, that may not be the most effective way of using landing pages. What has been shown to work much better than using a single landing page, especially when it comes to conversion rates, is to have a differently designed landing page for SEO traffic, to that which is used for paid traffic.

Why Every Page Can Be Considered A Landing Page

We wish to start by clarifying what we mean by a landing page because it is the case that there are many different views on what constitutes a landing page. You can legitimately say that every page is a potential landing page, especially if it is the first page within a website that a visitor arrives at from another source, and for this article that is how we are going to define them.

Now, what many will regard as definitive landing pages, are those which traffic is driven to, that have very little content, and which usually have a single purpose such as visitors submitting their email address, or clicking through to find out more about a product.

What this takes us to is a recognition that there are different types of landing pages, and depending on what type of traffic they receive and the purpose for which they are part of a website, it will make a difference in how they are designed to maximize their performance.

How PPC Landing Pages Should Be Designed

There is one overriding reason why PPC landing pages are designed differently from other landing pages, and that is the fact the traffic arriving there is paid for. Before anyone jumps and shouts out that SEO can cost too, we get that, but that payment is indirect, and it achieves more than a single click to a landing page.

However, with PPC you are paying for every single person who clicks on your ad and arrives at your landing page. That means that it must be designed to maximise one thing, and only one thing, conversions. If a landing page to which you are sending paid traffic is not designed to ensure that a high percentage of visitors follow the call to action that is there, then you are going to be spending a lot of money on traffic and seeing little or no return on it.

This means that a PPC landing page must be uncluttered, and certainly not in any danger of confusing visitors. The call to action on that page must be bold, immediately visible, and clear on what the person should do. There should be no other links, buttons, or anything else that could deflect from that call to action being followed.

SEO Landing Pages Aka Other Pages

Your SEO campaign is going to generate traffic to numerous pages, and many will be differently designed from others. For example, your ‘About Us’ page will look significantly different to the page which has your testimonials, and your Home page is going to look significantly different from a page that has details about one of your products or services.

The point here is that there is no ‘one size fits all’ design for all of your SEO landing pages, other than that they should all function properly, the content on them is high-quality, and all other design elements such as metadata should be in line with best SEO practices.