Customer experience has become top of mind for all types of marketers and SEO and search marketing campaigns of every variety.
However, having the wrong landing page copy – and sometimes even the wrong page – impacts conversion and revenue. Ultimately, this affects the success of any campaign.
Even if you think that it is still great that your page ranks high, no matter what the content is, you can face the following consequences:
Don’t worry, these things can be fixed.
Below is a checklist of emergency actions that will help you put everything in place.
Search engines are able to interpret a page’s topic without exact keywords in the HTML title tag, so it still has importance, as it is seen in three places of high visibility:
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In a vacuum, title tags may seem less significant. However, when working in context and conjunction with all other on-page factors and with all pages of a website, it is a factor in gaining more traffic.
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The importance of this tag is comparable to the title tag. The meta description helps with:
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The description gives users more details on your content and helps them determine whether it is relevant to their query.
Google advises you should also add some information about the page that the search engine will scrape for a more colorful SERP. You could also add the date of publication and the name of the author.
This preview influences your CTR.
What to Do:
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HTML header tags (H1-H6) are used to structure content and show its hierarchy within the page.
The use of header tags helps search engines read, understand and content much better. For the end-user, they help them navigate through the landing page – making it easier for them to find, engage and convert.
Header tags also provide a structure for a particular piece of content that allows visitors to consume the main points in a short period of time.
According to Google’s John Mueller,
“…headings on a page help us to better understand the content on the page. Headings on the page are not the only ranking factor that we have. We look at the content on its own as well.
But sometimes having a clear heading on a page gives us a little bit more information on what that section is about.”
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What to Do:
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It is as clear as day — content rules.
For search engines to find your content, they need some cues. Keywords are the best cues you can incorporate into your page.
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When your website is over 20 pages, it can be a good idea to have a search box on your website.
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A great thing about a search box is that you can integrate it with Google Analytics and view the queries that visitors enter at your site. This data will let you:
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Open Graph tags make snippets out of your links when they are shared via social media. This way, you can control how your content is represented after sharing on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
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It makes sense then to optimize OG tags to entice clicks and conversions.
What to Do:
Schema markup is a number of special vocabularies that you can use to mark your pages. As a result, your snippets will stand out in SERPs.
For example, your snippets may have additional elements like:
What to Do:
Google has two quite handy tools to help you with adding schema markup to your pages:
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Images, diagrams, infographics, and video tutorials make content more engaging, thus increasing the time spent on your landing page.
What’s more, besides clear improvement of user experience, some of these elements can be optimized for target keywords.
What to Do:
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The term “above the fold” had come from newspaper editors and become an SEO concept after Google’s page layout update, when it started penalizing sites for lots of ads above the imaginary fold.
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Even if you get a fair amount of revenue from displaying ads on your website, you have to remember that too many ads can have a negative impact on search rankings.
Make sure to have enough content above the fold:
The prominent placement of social share buttons will make sharing of your content even easier for your visitors.
What to Do:
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Page speed is now one of the most critical SEO considerations today. The upcoming roll-out of Core Web Vitals and the shift to mobile-first indexing shows how important Google thinks the user experience is.
What to Do:
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Mobile now accounts for 54.8% of all web traffic worldwide, and Google is now rolling out mobile-first indexing.
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This means that Google will look first on your mobile version when crawling, indexing, and ranking your websites, not your desktop version.
What to Do:
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Sometimes the wrong landing page will rank instead of your important page because it has higher authority backlinks, which is a strong relevancy signal to search engines.
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Outbound links to related external pages are a relevancy signal that helps search engines determine your page’s topic.
The wrong page that ranks may have more external links to high authority sites. Thus, search engines may think that this page is a hub of quality info and pull it to search listings.
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When several pages target the same topic (or keyword), your internal links get less valuable, and search engines cannot always determine the most relevant page for this topic. It is one of the most apparent reasons for the wrong page to rank.
What to Do:
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It is a rare thing in an SEO world to advise on how to degrade ranking signals of your own page.
But when this page ranks instead of a more prominent one and does no good whatsoever, this is the only way to deal with this unpleasant situation.
Here is a short plan for this act of self-sabotage:
Even though search engines can now determine a topic without exact-match keywords, it still won’t hurt to remove references to targeted keywords. This also includes anchor text that is optimized for keywords.
If you do not want to devalue a wrongly ranked page because it still contains valuable information and inbound links, you can consider merging these pages to create a master page on this topic.
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If you have a couple of pages with almost identical content, use rel=canonical to inform search engines which page is more important. It will prevent you from having duplicate content and save you from keyword cannibalization.
This measure can be taken for those pages that are still valuable for your visitors, but you do not need them to rank in search results.
For example, it is true for blog category pages. You do not want them to be indexed and potentially end up in search results instead of your much more valuable pages.
Just use robots meta tag in your HTML to noindex such pages.
It sounds pretty radical, but you have to do it if this page has:
Before deleting, make sure that this page does not have any important backlinks and internal links. Also, add a 301 redirect from this page to a similar one that you would like to be ranking.
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I’m sure that by going through the list I have laid out above, you will find help to ensure you get the right landing page for optimal conversion.
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Image Credits
All screenshots taken by author, May 2021
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