SEO vs. SEM Landing Pages
February 11th, 2008 by Jacob WolfsheimerIn Website Magazine’s latest issue, there’s an article about landing pages, and how when someone lands on your page as a result of an organic listing, the landing page should serve a different purpose than when someone lands on a PPC landing page. I respectfully disagree with the statement that, “the methods and goals are radically different.” Landing page goals are to drive visitors through a conversion funnel to a desired action, regardless of organic traffic or paid traffic. The methods used to create the user experience on an SEO landing page is marginally different than the methods used to create the user experience on a PPC landing page.
And I respectfully disagree that “SEO pages tend to be website home pages and very general in nature.” I don’t know whether the author intended to write “organic listings” as opposed to SEO pages, but the truth of the matter is that you can (and absolutely should!) optimize more than just your homepage. It is important to try and rank your important pages and build new ones that can rank for relevant, targeted terms, and write descriptive meta tags (which are still used by search engines) in their SERPs for describing your pages. You can rank subpages for terms, and not simply your homepage. In some cases, you can rank both your homepage and a subpage in top rankings, not to mention that site links allow for more subpages to get attention than simply your homepage.
According to the author, “SEO-oriented landing pages must be more general and less action-oriented.” I disagree. SEO landing pages must be optimized to be action-oriented, and must NOT be more general in nature than a PPC landing page. Next time you’re building SEO landing pages, remember that organic listings may in some cases favor homepages, but that optimizing subpages for more specific key phrases can still get you competitive rankings that drive visitors to action upon arrival at your site.
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You hit the nail on the head Jacob. I couldn’t agree more. Landing pages for PPC are incredibly useful fro organic landing pages. In general, if you MV test a landing page and goal funnel you can literally copy it over to the “main” site for use with organic visitors.
I thin that in general, organic visitors are either a different persona or in a different mindset but that doesn’t mean your goal is.
Love your blog BTW.
Thanks for your comments Dave.
It’s interesting to see how people group organic vs. paid, when they can often be inextricably linked.
I don’t necessarily think organic visitors are in a different mindset. Each keyword query a searcher uses can be along a research or buying spectrum, just as the keywords we use for PPC campaigns can reach people at different times in the buying cycle.