One of our top tools in the SEO toolbox

SEO is an art form and a science, with subtleties galore and very few shortcuts. As more and more of life and commerce moves online, it becomes trickier to gain traffic and views for your own particular piece of digital real estate. 

There are no easy “hacks” to optimising your site for search engine, but this is one approach we have found that works well in many cases: setting up a targeted “landing page” on a separate URL to hone in on a specific location, service, or product. In conjunction with a good Adwords campaign, it can produce great results.

Specific, targeted landing pages

Sometimes a site can get too big and broad. While a vast site with lots of information certainly has its advantages SEO-wise, it can be intimidating for anyone searching for a very specific service, especially if they are looking for it in a particular geographic location. When a company operates regionally, nationally, or globally, it can be difficult to target customers in one area with the main site. The same goes for a specific service or product that’s being launched—these new or unique offerings can get lost in a broad .

Our strategy for those businesses finding themselves in this situation has been to develop smaller, targeted sites with their own URL but the same branding. These are smaller, with more specialist information relating to the geographical location or specific service they are targeting—basically, a standalone landing page for some part of the business that the company wishes to highlight or separate. The URL and headings on the page should match up with the keywords that are being targeted. 

And how are those keywords targeted? That brings us to the next part of this method…

Focused Adwords campaigns

The pages outlined above aren’t necessarily designed to rank organically on their own, although if it’s a location or service with little competition, they may do. The intention for these pages is to use them as the landing page for a targeted Google Adwords campaign which will capture the searches of those people seeking exactly what it is the business has to offer—be that a specialised service, a specific product, or a common service or product in a particular location.

While clickbait is a loaded word, these pages are intended to hit all of the right words and phrases to indicate to a reader that they are in the right place, and to give them the best possible quality score. They also include calls to action at each fold-through—when coupled with a good Adwords campaign, these landing pages should be conversion machines.

An example

One client was finding that the website displaying their physio services across Wellington, Kapiti and Palmerston North was too broad to properly target their potential customers in the Kapiti region. We set up a new condensed site with the URL kapitiphysio.co.nz, and made it the landing page for an Adwords campaign aimed at those searching out physio services in the area. Now, it’s much easier to find and stands out in the results as very relevant to those searches.

This principle can apply in many different situations and is a fantastic tool in the SEO arsenal. The pages are smaller with less content than the typical website, functioning as an offshoot of a main site—as such, they are much cheaper and easier to have built. However, we do keep in mind that clients may like to expand them later on down the track, so set them up with that in mind.

If you are interested in trying out this method for your business, and feel you are in a situation where such a landing page would be helpful, . We would love to discuss how we can get eyes on your page—the right eyes!