SEO vs. PPC Landing Pages
Search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising both play critical roles in any digital marketing strategy. One of the most important for both is the landing page.
Although both SEO and PPC landing pages follow many of the same best practices such as mobile friendly designs and conversion rate optimization tactics, there are a few key differences that separate the best SEO landing pages from the best PPC landing pages.
In this article, we’ll take a look at how the differences in goals and strategy of these two campaign types generate distinct best practices in PPC & SEO landing page design.
What Makes a Strong Landing Page?
Good landing pages serve a particular function that advances your business goals. Whether it’s making a direct purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or requesting a quote, meeting, or demo, a good landing page should be judged based on its ability to acquire traffic and convert users.
SEO & PPC Tactics
To understand the differences between PPC landing pages and SEO landing pages, one must first get a better overview of how PPC and SEO vary in the first place.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a website to rank highly in engines like Google. You do this through the use of specific keywords, among other tactics. The goal is to expand the page’s organic reach – meaning the page ranks highly on Google.
Pay-per-click (PPC) involves a situation where advertisers pay a fee every time someone clicks on their ad. On a search engine like Google, PPC ads typically appear alongside the organic results. The benefit here is that you don’t have to wait for your page to rank highly for your desired keywords naturally. So long as you’ve created the right type of compelling, relevant ad, you’re targeting the right audience, and you’re competitive in terms of how much you’re willing to pay for each click, you can quickly “buy your way” to the top.
While the overall look of both landing page types will be similar, the steps that you use to optimize them will vary.
SEO Landing Pages
SEO landing pages have a difficult job to do because they have not just one but two primary functions: user acquisition and user conversion.
Before we worry about converting users, we have to make sure they can find us to begin with.
Writing for Robots
While the search engine algorithms are in constant flux, they generally prefer pages with longer content. More text provides the robots with more material that they can use to discern what the page is about. With a more complete understanding of the page’s content, they’re better able to decide which users and search queries will find the page most useful.
Therefore, a big part of ranking on Google is demonstrating expertise on your given topic. They want to see websites approach their topic from different angles.
For example…
…let’s say you’re a law firm looking to rank for “car accident lawyers”. Google wants to see that your company knows what it’s talking about when it comes to traffic, insurance, and personal injury law.
As a result, you’ll often see landing pages for car accident attorneys featuring a wide range of content. They often contain instructions about what to do after an accident, facts about vehicle collisions, comparisons between different types of accidents, penalties for certain infractions, and on and on.
This content demonstrates a sufficient level of relevant knowledge on the given topic, and therefore, is worthy of ranking.
Now, are most users really going to find all of this information useful in their search for attorneys?
Probably not.
While some may find it useful, writing that much content takes valuable time and effort and could be better spent elsewhere. But it’s important for SEO, i.e. user acquisition.
In other words, it’s written for robots. Not humans.
Consequently, SEO landing pages tend to have a lot more “fluff.” But in the end, that’s what makes a good SEO landing page. They balance writing for robots and writing for humans.
PPC Landing Pages
On the other hand, PPC landing pages don’t need to “convince” search engines to rank their page. PPC user acquisition is primarily done off-page; in the Google Ads interface for example. We acquire users by creating quality ads and making competitive bids.
Because we don’t need to dedicate on-page space and resources to user acquisition, we can focus all of our efforts on maximizing conversions.
Writing for Conversions
In PPC, we’re paying a little bit for every user who lands on our page. Which means there’s a greater cost for non-converting clicks. We lose money for every user who lands on the page and doesn’t convert. Therefore more of our resources, efforts, and overall design should be spent on maximizing conversion rates.
What does this mean exactly?
Generally, it means that pages are more streamlined. The content tends to be short, sweet, and relevant.
If we’re bidding on key terms such as “car accident lawyers”, we don’t need all the “fluff” content about what to do after a car accident or penalties for certain infractions like we might see for SEO.
Our content should be dedicated to convincing users why our law firm is the right one to hire for their case.
Good landing pages (both SEO and PPC) also feature prominent calls to action with big obvious buttons and clearly marked forms. Users should have no question about how to engage your services.
CLICK HERE! SIGN UP NOW! CALL TODAY!
Moreover, we want users to convert. Not click away from the page. Thus, you might see PPC landing pages without any internal or outbound links. Not even a main navigation menu.
In the End
Overall, both PPC and SEO landing pages have a home in your digital marketing campaigns – you just need to better understand when and where to use each one. SEO landing pages tend to stand the test of time – meaning that once they rank in Google, they continue to bring in traffic. PPC landing pages tend to be focused on the short-term, meaning that they’re likely to lose their internal value once your campaign ends.
By understanding the best practices you need to use when optimizing each one, you’re left with invaluable resources that will help you accomplish all of your goals and more.