It’s tempting to think of the home page as the one entry point to a website. In reality, Google will land visitors anywhere it sees fit.
It’s an obvious behaviour to take advantage of but many sites don’t do so properly and lose valuable sales as a result of neglecting deeper pages which would be of greater interest to the visitor.
What is a landing page?
Any “deep” page which consistently ranks well for a particular search can be considered a landing page.
They can equally be for broad terms such as “children’s clothing” or long-tail terms such as “panasonic TX-L37U3B TV”.
Artificial landing pages
It can be tempting to created dedicated landing pages for your target search terms. This isn’t generally a good idea because dedicated landing pages tend to sit outside of the site architecture and rely more on external factors to gain their position. When they don’t rank as well as expected, it’s common to find desperate techniques such as keyword stuffing and scraped content to try and boost the ranking.
Single-purpose landing pages also tend to suffer from duplicated content issues, particularly when they are generated by a script. Often only a handful of words are changed and the content remains the same. We’ve previously seen this where a business has multiple showrooms and has attempted to rank en-mass for location specific terms. A collection of duplicated pages differing only in the name of the city was the result, and it just didn’t work.
Artificial landing pages tend to suffer from an astronomical bounce rate because they lack substance and rely too much on the visitor taking the initiative to click further into the site.
Work with what you already have
If you examine your site structure, it’s likely that there is already a page which would be the most suitable place to land a particular keyword. For long tail terms, individual product pages are likely to be a good bet, or for broader searches category or sub-category pages are a likely candidate.
You need to examine why a particular pre-existing deep page isn’t ranking. For e-commerce, consider the following:
- Can it be reached by following a series of plain HTML links from the homepage? Is it a reasonable number of steps?
- Do the page title and header tags closely match the particular product or category? Make sure the keywords are at the front and not pushed out of the way by useless wording such as “Viewing all products in category X”.
- Does the meta description (used for the snippet) give the searcher a good idea of what they will find?
- Make sure internal link anchor text is suitable
- Make sure you external links to your deep pages with suitable anchor text
- Ensure that product descriptions are unique. Group variants of products if you need to, with a drop-down to select the variant.
- Make sure that category descriptions are of sufficient length and include the right keywords.