Increase Website Traffic with Offpage SEO

 Increasing your organic traffic takes more than onpage SEO—that’s the easy stuff that you’ve likely nailed by now. 

Onpage SEO includes activities like: 

• Writing really good content that you post consistently to your website and social media sites.

• Developing metadescriptions that include your focus keyword. 

• Identifying keywords and phrases and using these in your headings and subheads, and using H tags

• Creating smart inner links among your website’s pages. 

• Optimizing images and using alt tags. 

Offpage SEO is an essential part of a successful SEO strategy 

Despite what they may tell you, even great content and good onpage SEO is just not enough for you to show up in search engines.

It’s the activity that’s OFF your website’s pages. It’s your total online and offline presence. It’s social media sites where you’re posting on a consistent basis. Offpage SEO includes brand-building and PR. Pitching articles to local publications or industry newsletters. Getting guest blogging and speaking opportunities and including links back to your website. It means networking and meeting people to grow your overall presence.

• These are examples of ways that you can build your offpage SEO:

• • Linkbuilding/Brand Building–Linkbuilding builds your brand. Building links starts with getting guest posts. Look for opportunities with online publications in your niche.

• • Content Marketing—this continue to evolve to include everything digital media. Content marketing fundamentally involves developing and distributing content across a growing number of channels. 

• • PR—developing relationships with online and traditional print media. Interviews, articles in the local paper or interviews on a popular radio program.

• • Local SEO—this includes Google Business Profile. Getting reviews on your GBP may be the single most important thing you can do for SEO. It’s also more accessible these days—you can access GBPs from Google Maps, etc.

• • Social Media—the social media universe is vast, and includes more than Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn. Decide what you can manage and post consistently with backlinks to your website.

• • Influencer Marketing—developing influencer relationships can help you reach new audiences that might not be available to you. Considered part of offpage SEO.

• • Events—online and in-person events. Networking, meeting people and growing your community opens up new opportunities.

You’re familiar with the Local Pack even if you didn’t know it had a name

You may not have known that the Local Pack was a standalone product in the search space. Let’s say you’re going to be in Athens for a month and you’re looking for cafes with wifi near your airbnb. (This was my local search during May.) You’re served up a map with three listings, your location and three nearby cafes. This is your Local Pack. I found a delightful little café in my neighborhood that became my go-to home for the month. Besides the speedy wifi, I loved this little café for its yummy food and friendly staff—all thanks to Local Pack!

Quality: High-quality backlinks are key to increasing your Google authority

In their simplest form, backlinks are simply links from one website to another. But in terms of SEO, they’re powerful. Google uses backlinks as a ranking signal because the link implies that the content has value, is trustworthy and worth sharing. Local link-building should be your number two priority after onsite optimization. Earning backlinks from high-authority websites helps position your site as an authority as well. These high authority links work like a “vote of trust” from one site to another. Quality trumps quantity.

Backlinks tell search engines what your products and services are about. High-quality backlinks help increase a site’s ranking position and visibility in search engines. Our goal is to get relevant, high-quality links from websites with high domain authority (DA). Note that not all backlinks are created equal. If I get a backlink from The New York Times, it is more relevant and has a higher Google authority than if I get a backlink from a colleague’s website where I wrote a guest post about the five best meeting management applications.  

Relevance: Identify and concentrate on your niche

Focus on getting backlinks from sites that topically align with your own. If yours is a website about biking, you should aim for most of the links you earn to come from other biking websites–bloggers, biking clothing companies, biking trails, biking equipment, etc. 

Public Relations: The perfect way to earn authority links at scale

Digital PR is now the link-building tactic of choice for many SEOs. Use PR tactics to promote a great story and corresponding linkable assets. It’s possible to earn a significant number of links by pitching story ideas to publications, radio and other media. 

Google keeps getting smarter and what that means for us

Google’s maturation has evolved as we key in longtail keyword phrases and get back detailed search results. Google now understands nuances. If I’m writing about weddings, Google knows that I’m also writing about photographers, dresses, caterers, honeymoon travel, etc. Adding a do-follow link to your website will help you show up in searches.

Pay attention to anchor texts

Anchor text are the phrases, URLs or words such as “click here” and “learn more”. If you are the one publishing an article on another platform, try to include your focus keyword in the anchor text. For example, if your focus keyword is “AI content writer”, the more backlinks with this anchor text you get, the better. 

Google’s bots index information 

Search algorithms measure the overall user experience to identify relevance and provide information that’s valuable for users. When someone includes your URL on a post or as a guest blog, the search algorithm counts that as a citation for your business. Citations are about sourcing—citing your website as a source. Offpage SEO calls for adding your website to those local directories that are appropriate. Relevance is key, so look for industry-specific directories. 

GBP ranking factor guidelines

Relevance: Complete and detailed business information will help Google better understand your business and match your listing to relevant searches. 

Distance: How far each potential business is from the location terms used in a search. Google prioritizes by location. 

Prominence: Your overall online presence. More reviews and positive ratings will improve your local ranking.

Guest Posting—this is where backlinks begin, with good content. What happens if you’re not a writer? Think podcasts and webinars!

Podcasts–the perfect medium for those who don’t write. Podcasts are part of offpage SEO, just as influencer marketing is.

• • Reviews influence the way we spend our money. Getting reviews on Yelp and GBP should be a component of every marketing plan. According to Whitespark’s 2021 Local Search Ranking Factors report, reviews can influence both the Google Local Pack and Local Finder rankings as well as local organic rankings. 

Reviews are important component of offpage SEO

A Google Business Profile (GBP) review well may be one of the first places a user encounters your name and brand. An estimated 79% of people said they trust reviews as much as a personal recommendation from friends or family. Your GBP acts as a mini-website that is displayed on the right-hand side of the Google search results page, which business owners can manage. 

Feedback from your clients will produce more keywords and phrases—your company name shows up again and words about your services. It’s always a good thing to be drilling down into the big, robust Google network. You can use a vast inventory of proprietary apps for just about everything, including keyword research. But Google owns the search space. Using their tools means that you’re in synch with their way of doing things. We may as well take advantage of this.

Conclusion: If this seems like a lot, it is! But SEO builds on itself

Once you develop good SEO habits and start writing good content, getting quality backlinks and guest blogging opportunities, you will start building momentum. It’s important to believe in the process. Keep reading and start saving articles that would be the foundation for good blogs and guest posts. Add your own experience to make these articles meaningful. Include little case studies. Be patient because results are not immediate. 

You may find that you need help or want to outsource part of the content development or backlink-building part of the process. Maybe it’s posting to your social media sites that someone else can take over. It’s for you to assess as you start to realize more success. 

We help businesses optimize their websites and show up in search. Contact Being Top of Mind. We’re writers, SEO and digital media specialists.

Building your Google Authority with Backlinks

 

Why are backlinks important?

A backlink is a link from one website to another—a “link back” to a site. Search engines like Google use backlinks as a ranking signal because when one website links to another, it means they believe the content is noteworthy. 

It’s all part of building Google authority

Remember that old thing about the more times your name appears in the online space, the more likely you’ll show up in search? While that has certainly evolved, the basic premise remains true. High-quality backlinks help increase your site’s ranking and visibility in search engine results.

How do backlinks work?

Backlinks play an important role in search engine algorithm, SEO, and your overall strategy for growing your website’s traffic. Think of backlinks as conversations between websites. Let’s say that Olivia is a landscape designer who writes about winter gardening in her popular blog. Michael is a master gardener who owns a nursery and has a blog with a large following. He links to Olivia’s article on his blog. 

Because both of these blogs have large followings and authority, others will link back to these articles. This is how backlinks are built. These are the third-party links that you want—not the one-on-one links where you and I trade links. 

There are two types of backlinks

• A Nofollow tag tells search engines to ignore a link. They don’t pass any value from one site to another. These links will not improve your search rank or visibility.
• Dofollow links are what we all want. They come from respected sites, hold the most value and will improve your search engine (Google) rankings. A link from The New York Times has significantly more value than a link from your small community paper. 

Building backlinks to your site takes time and effort. If someone promises to help you show up on page one of Google, be suspicious. It doesn’t just happen. 

Here are five ways to start building quality backlinks for your website

1.     Add links back to your site from your social media profiles.

2.     Do a Google search for a post that’s already ranking well and then improve and expand it.

3.     Create list posts, “how-to” posts, “why” posts, infographics, or posts with embedded videos. These formats usually get more backlinks than standard posts.

4.     Write guides or how-to articles–comprehensive posts containing several thousand words.

5.     Look for guest posts on other blogs and websites. Opportunities are numerous. Every company providing products and services has a website. They generally have a blog because they need content, and they’re happy to have guest posts. They generally require at least 1,500 words and have stringent requirements. To find these opportunities, Google your industry, then something like “guest post opportunities” or “write guest posts”, etc. This is a project, not a one-off. It’s time-consuming and takes a commitment. There’s a big difference between a 1,500-2,000-word and a 500-word article, but it’s worth the effort.

Questions? Ask me about improving your Google ranking! 

We help businesses optimize their websites and show up in search. Contact Being Top of Mind. We’re writers, SEO and digital media specialists.

New SEO Trends: Google Enhances the User Experience

What are the new SEO trends? 

Back in 2020, Google began incorporating new metrics for measuring website loading time and overall user experience: Web Vitals. By summer 2021, these metrics would become part of their core algorithm update, which means they would be used to assess the overall user experience. Read about how Google has enhanced the user experience.

SEO trends 2022: Core Web Vitals

There is a subset of metrics every site owner should focus on, called Core Web Vitals. According to Google, “Core Web Vitals is a set of real-world, user-centered metrics that quantify key aspects of the user experience.”

Each Core Web Vital metric looks at a specific piece of the page experience puzzle and together they help both Google and the user make sense of the perceived site experience. Core Web Vitals are available in all Google tools that measure the page experience.

User experience affected by a wide range of criteria, including load time

How hard can this be? You click a link in the search results, and the corresponding page appears. But we all know that’s not always how it works. Pages (and images) have increased in size; the addition of JavaScript has made them even harder to load. Even with our speedy internet connections and sophisticated devices, waiting for a webpage to load can be a drag. More often, we move on.

Google SEO trends

But loading times are only part of the equation; the harder part is defining and measuring the overall user experience. This is about how a user experiences all those optimizations. A website well could load quickly, but it still may not feel fast, and the overall user experience may not be positive. 

According to Google: 

“Great page experiences enable people to get more done and engage more deeply. A bad page experience could stand in the way of a person’s being able to find the valuable information on a page.” Google still seeks to rank pages with the best information overall, even if the page experience is subpar. Great page experience doesn’t override having great page content. However, in cases where there are many pages that may be similar in relevance, page experience can be much more important for visibility in Search.”

The Core Web Vitals will evolve, but for now, Google identified three specific focal points:

• Loading
• Interactivity
• Visual stability

These focal points correspond with three new metrics:

• LCP: Largest Contentful Paint–This metric tells how long it takes for the largest content element you see in the viewport to load.
• FID: First Input Delay–The FID looks at how long it takes for a browser to respond to an interaction first triggered by the user (clicking a button, for instance)
• CLS: or Cumulative Layout Shift–This is a new metric that measures the percentage of the screen affected by movement—for instance, does stuff jump around on the screen?

These core metrics transcend load time. The Cumulative Layout Shift is about how all of the elements on the page work together. Do all of the images and text load together so you see the full page at once rather than its individual parts?

Combining new metrics with existing ranking factors

The launch of Web Vitals was noteworthy on its own, but Google stepped it up. Google is going to incorporate these new metrics into their existing SEO ranking factors to help with ranking pages. 

Web Vitals helps make up the page experience ranking factors, including:

• Mobile-friendliness—whether or not your site is optimized for mobile.
• HTTPS—is your site using a secure connection?
• Interstitial use–does your site stay away from nasty pop-ups?

These new user-centered metrics take into account everything a user experiences on a website to try to come up with a more holistic view of your site’s performance.

New insights provide more comprehensive analysis

Of course, this is just another way for Google to get a sense of how good your site is and it might be easy to overstate the importance of this particular update. It’s still going to be impossible to rank a site with a great user experience but crappy content. While the quality of your content still reigns supreme in getting good rankings, the performance and perceived experience users have now also come into play. 

Latest SEO trends 2022

Put these new SEO trends to work for your company. Contact Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and content marketing specialists.

What’s the Best Way to Do Keyword Research

I recently watched a YouTube tutorial on keywords and online ads—some of these guys are really smart, and I’m always up for learning something new–but the guy who was doing this tutorial hadn’t done any research on his keywords. He just used his company name and tacked on a few words to make up each keyword phrase. Unbelievable. This guy was completely missing the most important part of doing PPC campaigns: KEYWORDS! 

So now of course I was curious, and I researched his keywords to see how they ranked, and not surprisingly, they all fell in the “Low”, range, which means that no one is even searching for the terms he’s using! There were no costs associated with his keywords because no one is searching for them. He totally missed what is the most fundamental part of PPC/online advertising. 

What is keyword research?

Online advertising is an auction. You’re bidding on words/phrases. In some ways, it’s an equalizer—you can bid against the big guys where your bid is as good as anyone else’s. But doing comprehensive keyword research to understand what words/phrases you can afford to bid on is critical to your campaign’s success. 

Keyword research:

• Is the process of finding and analyzing search terms for online optimization (SEO). 
• It can identify the popularity of queries and their ranking difficulty—which translates to their cost per click (CPC) and the bids’ affordability for you. 
• It helps identify the keywords for which your audience is searching.

 

How to do keyword research for Google ads

Keywords have evolved. Keyword research tells you what topics people care about and how those topics rank with your audience. The operative term here is topics—by researching keywords that are getting a high volume of searches per month, you can identify and sort your content into topics that you want to write about. These topics will then dictate which keywords you target. It’s the intent behind those keywords, and whether or not a piece of content satisfies the intent.

How do I do my own keyword research?

Make a list of important, relevant topics that are indigenous to your business. Ideally, you will have five-ten information buckets of topics. If you’re a blogger, your blog’s categories should directly translate to your topics and are a great place to start. Fill those buckets with related keywords and keyword phrases. Get creative. Do some googling to find related words. Or use the thesaurus in MSWord to get started thinking about this.

You’ll want to plug your keywords into a keyword tool to narrow down your list. There is a range of proprietary tools on the market that come with a pricetag. You’ll see references to Semrush, Moz and Ahrefs, for instance. All are very good products that do a lot in the SEO space. 

How to use Google Keyword Planner

I use Google’s Keyword Planner. I really like that it’s free, and Google owns the search space, so it makes sense to use their free tools. Enter your keywords/phrases into the search field in Google’s Keyword Planner, and you’ll get a results screen that shows a wide range of data—the number of monthly searches for that term, competition, and pricing for the keywords and phrases you’re considering.

I start by sorting on the Competition column. You want High search volume results—maybe Medium. Forget Low—if no one’s searching for that keyword, why bother? Look at the next two columns to the right and you’ll see projected prices for words at the top of the page and the prices at the low end of the page. Forget about the low end—they’re meaningless. You’re interested in the high-end prices. Time for a big reality check. You’ll find that people are paying a lot of money for a chance to be on page one of a google search—and that, of course, is the holy grail, our true north. Page 1 of a search.

The best way to do keyword research

Identify your budget and decide how much you’re willing to pay when someone clicks on your ad. Look at the top of column prices and eliminate those words that are way too costly—you’re going to find that it’s a lot of these, so you’ll have to get creative about identifying your keywords and building your ad. Keep drilling down to find new words and new combinations of words that are a fit for your business. Continue to work the keyword planner until you find a group of keywords/phrases that are a good fit for your ad marketing goals and fall within your budget. 

Pay attention to the phrases that Google planner spits back at you while you’re doing keyword research. Learn from them. Some of these keywords provide industry insights of which you may not have been aware. Use these and/or combine them with other words and do another search. For each keyword/phrase, look at the competition and top-page cost. Continue this process of identifying potential keywords and running this test. Copy the words/phrases that meet your specs—relevance and affordability–so that you can use them in your campaign. 

Keyword research can be time-consuming and frustrating

This is just an example of how the results screens pick up words and come back with results—often irrelevant ones. I was looking for keywords for one of my clients who owns a small storage/moving business. His business is entirely rental. People use his services on a short-term rental basis only. Google keyword planner kept throwing back phrases about moving and storage containers for sale. What? This gives you an idea of how Google works—it recognizes a relationship between rent and sale and “sale” words show up on the result screen. Keep trying new word combinations, stay diligent until you identify enough words to create your campaign.

Try to include a mix of short terms and long-tail keywords

Long-tail keywords, or longer phrases, will have a lower monthly search volume. While they may have lower search volume, they also will have more qualified responses. More words narrow the qualifications—and the quality of your responses. These are the people who are at the bottom of the sales funnel, ready to buy.

Keyword research can be confusing, but it’s the most important part of your online advertising (PPC) campaign. Getting this right is essential. Contact Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and content marketing specialists.

What's the Importance of Offpage SEO?

Increasing your organic traffic takes more than onpage SEO

That’s the easy stuff that you likely have nailed by now. You’re doing all the right things to increase your organic traffic. Things like: 

• Writing really good content. 
• Developing metadescriptions that include your focus keyword. 
• Identifying keywords and phrases and using these in your headings and subheads, in your titles and metadescriptions.
• Creating smart inner links among your pages. 
• Optimizing images by labeling them with your company name and the image’s description and providing descriptive alt tags. 

But this isn’t enough. You also need to be doing off-page SEO

Off-page SEO is an essential part of a successful SEO strategy—it’s the activity that’s OFF your website’s pages. It’s your total online and offline presence. It’s your social media sites where you’re posting on a consistent basis. It includes podcasts and the reviews you’re getting on your Google Business Profile. If you’re not into endless self-promotion, asking for reviews can be uncomfortable. Get over it. All of us are reading reviews these days before making both big and small decisions. 

What is the importance of offpage SEO

What’s most important about offpage SEO is understanding that it’s the activity that takes place OFF the webpage. It’s the stuff you’re doing away from your website to build your brand. 

Off-page SEO includes brand building and PR. That’s getting out in front of the public. Pitching articles to local publications or industry newsletters. Looking for opportunities to be a guest blogger or speaker. It includes networking, meeting people and growing your presence. 

According to Whitespark’s 2021 Local Search Ranking Factors report, reviews can influence both the Google Local Pack and Local Finder rankings as well as local organic rankings. You do want to be part of local search and show up on Google’s Local Pack. Podcasts are part of offpage SEO, just as influencer marketing is is. 

You’ve seen the Local Pack a gazillion times

You didn’t know it was a product in the search space. Let’s say you’re going to be in Athens for a month and you’re looking for cafes with wifi near your airbnb. (My local search for the month of May.) You’re served up a map with three listings, your location and that of three cafes. This is your Local Pack. I found a delightful little café in my neighborhood that became my go-to home with yummy food and friendly people, thanks to Local Pack!

GBP ranking factors guidelines

• Relevance: Complete and detailed business information will help Google better understand your business and match your listing to relevant searches. 
• Distance: How far each potential business is from the location terms used in a search. Google prioritizes by location. 
• Prominence: Your overall online presence. More reviews and positive ratings will improve your local ranking.

Reviews are another important component of offpage SEO

A Google Business Profile (GBP) review well may be one of the first places a user encounters your name and brand. 79% of people said they trust reviews as much as a personal recommendation from friends or family. Your GBP acts as a mini-website or citation that is displayed on the right-hand side of the Google search results page, which business owners can manage. It’s building a relationship within the Google environment. 

Feedback from your clients will produce more keywords and phrases—your company name shows up again and words about your services. It’s always a good thing to be drilling down into this big, robust Google network. That’s why I believe in using these Google tools. You can use a vast inventory of proprietary apps for just about everything, including keyword research. But Google owns the search space. Using their tools means that you’re in synch with their way of doing things. Take advantage of this.

We can help optimize your website. Contact Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and content marketing specialists.

Google Ranking Factors 2022 

I recently read an article recommending we blog four-five times/week. That’s crazy. I don’t know anyone who has the resources to produce four or more quality articles/week. I try to blog once/week, but we all know how that goes–sometimes it just doesn’t happen. 

Is publishing content related to ranking?

While I’ve always believed that the more you publish to the online space, the likelier you’ll show up in a search, I have no documented proof for this. But Google recently conducted an SEO hangout to discuss content and rankings. Specifically, “If I add content every day will I increase my rankings?” 

How do I rank my content?

Posting daily or at any specific frequency doesn’t help with ranking better in Google search results. But the more pages you have in the Google index, the more your content may show up in search results. The key equalizer is the quality of your content and getting that content indexed.

Ranking factors in SEO

Google bots are constantly crawling the internet and indexing content. They’re looking for your headings and subheadings, for H1 and H2 tags. But Google doesn’t crawl all content. If the content isn’t crawled, it’s not going to be indexed, which means it’s not going to get ranked. Part of the reason Google might not crawl that content is the overall quality of a website. 

I worked with a client who had a really awful website with terrible blogs that she copied and pasted from other sources. These blogs were maybe 300 words or so, not the 750-word count that we recommend. There were no images, no headings or subheads with the requisite H1 and H2 tags that Google looks for. She made no effort to insert snappy intros, opinions or experiences that would have personalized them. These were examples of content that is likely not being indexed. 

How long does it take for new content to rank on Google

For websites that have just launched, Google doesn’t know if the quality of that content is good. It could be a site with a big database and thousands of pages—Google does like quantity, after all. But Google will be cautious about crawling and indexing those pages until it’s sure that the quality is actually good. 

February 2022: Google’s John Mueller’s advice on getting content indexed

According to Mueller, “Internal linking is very important for us to understand what you would consider to be important on a website. For example, being linked from the home page is usually a sign that you care about these pages, so maybe we should care about them more.” He also suggested focusing less on quantity and more on the quality of content. “Making sure that it’s easy for us to recognize the important content on a website is really good.”

More from Mueller: “I’ve noticed that readers can become obsessed with discovering new content when they are highly engaged with a topic. In my opinion, content can be like eating popcorn when the reader has a strong engagement with the topic – they can’t stop reading and keep coming back for more. People who are engaged with a topic will click through when they see an article on their important topic in the search results.

Making sure your site can be crawled by search engines is key

There are tools that can analyze crawlability, including Screaming Frog. It will evaluate crawlability and metadescriptions. It can also find broken links and duplicate content–Google hates duplicate content. 

There’s more, of course. We’re content marketing specialists. Contact Top of Mind Marketing to talk about Google ranking factors and your website.  

What’s the Difference Between a Pillar Page and a Landing Page?

Pillar pages and landing pages have completely different functions, but they can work together to help generate leads and show up organically in search engines.

What is a pillar page?

A pillar page, or content pillar, is part of a larger pillar-page strategy that provides in-depth coverage of a topic. The pillar page strategy is supported by subpages and blogs that provide relevant information on the same topic. It’s hierarchical, with all content rolling up to the main pillar page topic. Search engine crawlers prioritize websites with this kind of topic-organized content. It can help you rank for important inquiries. 

What is pillar page SEO? 

Pillar page SEO means identifying keywords you want to rank for and using these throughout your pillar page strategy. This is what it’s all about. Use those keywords in your headings, subheads and other text. Be sure to assign H1 and H2 tags to these headings. Be consistent—use these words throughout all of your online accounts.

Landing pages focus on a single topic: Lead generation

Unlike pillar pages that provide comprehensive coverage of a single topic, good landing pages can focus on a single objective—lead generation. A landing page is a dedicated page on a website that you land on directly from an external source such as a paid ad or email. It’s highly targeted, persuasive in nature, designed to connect with a predetermined audience. Landing pages can be constructed for SEO purposes to capture organic search traffic. They can also be used with paid advertising through search engines or social media.

Landing pages in a marketing campaign

Landing pages are usually accessed by a link from a paid ad or email. Traffic from paid ads has high commercial intent and is usually ready to complete an action. The page must be ready to fulfill that need. 

A landing page should be providing:

• A unique proposition. Define what makes your product so appealing and enticing. Why should the user take action? Use the proposition in the headline to gain attention and encourage the user to read the supporting copy. Follow best practices for writing headlines and subheads. Short, crisp, attention-getting headers. Easy to read fonts. Use an image that’s descriptive, one that helps define your further your proposition. 

Just one thing. Make sure you’re promoting one thing. I see this a lot. It quickly becomes confusing and dilutes your messaging. Make sure you’re promoting one product or one service.

• Call to Action (CTA). The most important part of the page. Make your CTA button obvious and stand out. Include a CTA above the fold and repeat at the bottom of the page. 
• 
  
• Benefits of the offer. Don’t sell features, sell benefits. How will this make the user feel? How will it make their lives or jobs easier, save them money, etc. There must be a visceral appeal.
• 
  
• Social proof. Word of mouth and social approval offer trust. People are risk-averse and reviews are now a fact of life. None of us makes a purchase these days without reading the reviews. We’re reassured by others’ positive experiences.

Can a home page be a landing page? 

Theoretically, your homepage is a landing page. But it has too many functions to be focused on landing page conversion. The home page usually exists as the portal, enabling a user to navigate to other pages. Despite the trend toward minimizing navigation, I don’t get it. Why make it difficult for users to find what they’re looking for? 

Unlike your homepage, a landing page is designed to convert visitors into leads. Landing pages are the gatekeepers to your most valuable content offers. Landing pages map to the sales funnel. 

• Awareness
• Discovery
• Evaluation
• Intent
• Action
• Loyalty

Aside from delivering on the promise and intent of the query, the organic landing page must also make the brand and offer clear. 

Ask us about how a pillar-page strategy and landing pages work together to help improve your ranking in search engines. Contact Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and content marketing specialists.