SEO landing pages

What an SEO landing page is

An SEO landing page is a new page built for one commercial search and the person making it. One search, one page. The search is one where the person typing it wants a supplier rather than an explanation: a service plus a place, a product plus a problem, a job plus the word cost. The page answers that person completely and asks them to get in touch.

It is not the campaign landing page. That page exists for paid traffic: an advert, an email, a printed code. It hides the navigation, it repeats the promise of the ad just clicked, and it has no obligation to be found by anybody. This page has the opposite job. Nobody sends traffic to it, so it has to earn its own visitors: it sits in the site structure, links to and from the pages around it, and is built to match a search that already exists. The two look alike on screen and come from different plans.

It is also not SEO website copy, which rewrites pages you already have. This is a page that did not exist yesterday.

When you need one

You need one when there is a search your buyers make, with money behind it, and nothing on your site aimed at it. That is the whole test. Most businesses have between five and thirty of these, and they are usually the plainest searches in the trade: the service and the town, the repair and the machine, the problem and the word “cost”.

The second case is a site where one page is trying to serve four searches at once. A page headed “Our Services” that mentions six things in a paragraph each cannot be the best answer to any of them. Splitting it produces six pages of this kind.

You do not need this if you do not yet know which searches are worth a page. Deciding what each search wants comes first, and it will often show that the search you had in mind wants an article, not a supplier. You also do not need it when the search has a place name in it and the whole business is local: that is a local SEO page, which carries different material.

What goes in it

The order is fixed, because it is the order the reader asks in.

• The thing, named, in the first line. In the words of the search, not your internal name for it. Someone who typed the search should know within a second that they are in the right place.
• What it costs, or how the cost is worked out. The most-searched and least-answered thing on any commercial page. A range with the reasons it varies beats silence, and it filters out the enquiries you did not want.
• What is included and what is not. Specific: what you turn up with, what you leave behind, what the customer has to arrange, what you will not do.
• Proof that is checkable. Photographs of your own work, a licence number, a named person, a job in a place a reader recognises. Not adjectives about quality.
• The objections, answered on the page. How soon, what if it goes wrong, do you cover my area, do I need a permit. Each is a reason people leave, and each is cheap to remove.
• One clear action. A phone number, a form, a booking. The same one throughout, and a sentence saying what happens after they use it.

There is no keyword density target and no word count to hit. The page is as long as the answer takes. It gets found because a person arriving on it found what they came for, and it stops being found the moment it stops doing that.

What you get

The page. One editable document per page, with headings marked and the structure indicated, ready to paste into your site or to hand to whoever builds it.

The title and description. The clickable line in the results list and the summary under it, written for this page and this search.

The link plan. Which existing pages should point at the new page and in what words, because a new page with nothing linking to it can sit unread for months.

A note on what to photograph. A short list of the images the page needs. Stock photographs of other people in hard hats earn nothing, and a page waiting on a photograph never goes live.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. An Edmonton company that installs epoxy flooring in garages and workshops has one page headed “Flooring Solutions” covering four kinds of work. It ranks for nothing and takes most of its work by referral.

Research names five commercial searches: garage floor coating with the city, epoxy floor cost, shop floor coating for a mechanic bay, concrete floor repair before coating, and one about how the job holds up in a prairie winter. Four get pages; the fifth wants an article, not a supplier, and is set aside. Each page opens with a price per square foot and the three things that move it, then cure time and how long a vehicle must stay off the floor, then photographs of finished floors with the district named. The winter question is answered on all four rather than kept for its own page. “Flooring Solutions” becomes a short hub linking to them, and every quote the company emails now points at the matching page.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you sell, which searches you think are worth a page, and what a buyer asks you on the phone. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Priced per page, with the searches named in the quote, agreed before anything starts.
3. Material. Your prices or the way you set them, two or three recent jobs I can describe, and read-only access to your search data.
4. The writing. Four to six working days for the first page and three to four for each after it. Four pages is two to three weeks.
5. One round of revisions, then delivery. Drafts come to you together so you can see them as a set. Corrections of fact are not counted as a revision round.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because one page and a set of twelve are different projects and the research behind them varies. The pricing page sets out the four ways of working here and the bands with published numbers. The figure is fixed in writing before the first draft, and it does not move.

What happens next

Three things typically follow. The pages get pointed at properly with internal linking, which is what turns a new page from published into found. The learning searches that were set aside get written as narrow articles answering one question, which then link down to these pages. Or, if a page is being found and read and the phone still does not ring, the repair is conversion copy rather than more search work. Each page is finished work in its own right, and nothing further is assumed.