How To Optimize Landing Page Keywords
In order to earn a second income online you need to maximize your traffic – targeted traffic is the best kind of internet traffic. Much of my success is enabled by building landing pages that earn me money – and then working hard to drive traffic to those pages. One of the methods I use for that is to analyze my traffic to find keywords I haven’t properly targeted, and going after those keywords harder.
In this article I will show you how I do that with two specific examples (the names have been changed to protect the innocent!) – the first is how I compare the keywords for a landing page with the keywords that are driving traffic – and how I use that information about the website traffic to modify the page, hopefully for the better!
The second example will show how I compare the keyword traffic to two similar landing pages and use that information to tweak one of the pages.
Comparing Meta Keywords with Traffic Keywords
For this first example I will be looking at a landing page of mine where I am selling, through affiliate links, a variety of “purple widgets.” The landing page is a review site were I provide my top 3 favorite purple widgets. All of this data is real but of course I have changed some of the terms.
First, here are the meta keywords I use to describe the landing page. Many of these keywords are also included as text on the page although not all:
new purple widget review
purple widget review
purple widget reviews
review purple widget
new widget review
new widget reviews
new widget
brand1 new widget
brand2 new widget
brand3 new widget
new purple widget
purple widgets rewview
purple widget ratings
purple widgets ratings
The first thing I will point out is that in the course of doing this analysis I saw that I had misspelled one of the keywords as “rewview” – I am going to fix that but before I do I am going to check Google Analytics to make sure that keyword isn’t driving traffic. Misspellings can be a good source of traffic!
So now let’s use Google Analytics to see the top ten search terms that are driving traffic to my page:
| Keyword | Pageviews |
|---|---|
| purple widget reviews | 59 |
| purple widgets ratings | 56 |
| purple widget ratings | 43 |
| purple widget review | 32 |
| best new widget | 19 |
| best widgets for drawing | 18 |
| drawing widget reviews | 18 |
| new widget reviews | 15 |
| best purple widget | 14 |
| new widget ratings | 11 |
That’s one month worth of pageviews. This landing page floats in and out of the first page of Google for the top keywords I am targeting, and of course my goal is get it firmly entrenched in the top 3 if I can. Given the competition I have the top spot will probably not be possible, but top 5 should be easily attainable and that is my goal.
The keywords in green are ones that are also in the meta keywords section of my landing page. So what I like to do is to take those keywords that are not in green and add those to the meta keywords section of the landing page and, where I can, to include those terms in the content of the page. The theory is those keywords are already driving traffic and I have not even optimized for those keywords – by doing so I may be able to get even more traffic from them.
Comparing Keywords Between Two Landing Pages
The second example I will be showing you is how to compare keywords driving traffic to two different landing pages to see if you can learn anything from one to tweak the other. What I like to do is to take my best performing landing page and then use that to compare against each of my other pages. Where I see differences I make changes.
Here is an example comparing two different landing pages:
| Purple Widgets | Twotone Whatzits | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Keyword | Pageviews | Keyword | Pageviews |
| purple widget reviews | 59 | twotone whatzit reviews | 63 |
| purple widgets ratings | 56 | two tone whatzit reviews | 53 |
| purple widget ratings | 43 | best twotone whatzit | 13 |
| purple widget review | 32 | twotone whatzit review | 13 |
| best new widget | 19 | two tone whatzit review | 11 |
| best widgets for drawing | 18 | best twotone whatzits | 9 |
| drawing widget reviews | 18 | best twotone whatzit | 6 |
| new widget reviews | 15 | best two tone for drafting | 6 |
| best purple widget | 14 | which whatzit for drafting? | 6 |
| new widget ratings | 11 | twotone whatzits reviews | 6 |
The first thing I notice now is something that probably should have caught my eye before, but that is that on the Purple Widgets page I have not included the keyword of “purple widgets reviews” – I only noticed that when comparing to the second site. So I am also going to add that as a keyword for the first site. Read my post on using keyword plurals to learn more about that concept.
The second thing I notice is that on the purple widgets page I am getting traffic for the word “ratings” in addition to review. You will also see from up above that I have inlcuded those terms in my meta keywords. They were not originally there but I started seeing traffic using those phrases so utilizing the method shown in the first example I included targeted those phrases and now I see it is paying off.
But what I also see is that I have not yet optimized the twotone whatzits page with the word “ratings” – and as I have learned now many people appear to search for ratings when looking for reviews – so, I am going to add some phrases such as “twotone whatzit ratings” and “two tone whatzit ratings” to the meta keywords section of that landing page and do the same for other similar pages I have.
So that’s it – a couple of tips for how I optimize my landing page keywords to improve targeted traffic. I hope it helps, and good luck on earning your secondary income online!
We’ll come back in a month and do another analysis of these pages to see how things went. See Landing Page Keywords Update.
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8 Comments on How To Optimize Landing Page Keywords
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Michael Flint on
Thu, 19th Feb 2009 10:12 pm
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Peter Please Answer - Will I Get a New Job in 2009? | The Mystery of Peter Answers on
Sun, 12th Apr 2009 2:58 am
Very interesting. I’m a graphic designer and agree with all that you’ve said here. I just posted an article on thedesign and layout of landing pages here. I only touched briefly on the necessity of good keywords. You should comment on my blog with a link back to this article.
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