Landing Pages for Generating Leads - Must They Be Optimized for SEO?

[BlueBird33]

Question about landing pages:

There are landing pages created just for classified advertising.

They are stand alone pages. And, are not linked to website (although one can
get there via the url)

The purpose of these pages is to generate leads.

They are keyword rich in title, head and content

Content varies, only by 30%

Should those pages be optimized like websites?

They have a nofollow tag, is that enough?

Thank you for taking the time to answer.

Peggy

[Sebes]

Hey Peggy,

Just to clarify: These pages are on your main domain, but not linked to by any other page? Do these pages link to other pages on the domain?

If you fear that there might be a DC issue, then better not list these pages in your sitemap.xml and make them noindex (and follow, so if someone links to it you get the linkpower to your indexed pages). It's hard to answer whether 30% variation would be sufficient, but you could try to get a few indexed and see how they rank (if at all).

If you dont index them, you might want to optimise for conversion and not so much for SEO purposes.

Sebastian

[NFI]

Hi Peggy, I have done some work on classifieds before. When you say lead generation, you mean that you want people to register their interest in the product advertised? Regardless of the use, if these are landing pages which are generating traffic I would strongly recommend optimizing these pages. I know it is impractical to do when there are a lot of pages but you can add generic title tags with a character limit so your website would look - [custom title] | Yoursite.com. Is your classified advert user generated or are they generated by yourself?If it's generating traffic I would work on them, personally.

It's a little tricky to judge without the URL so It might be a little generic.

[EGOL]

People who really know what they are doing create lots of landing pages of nearly identical content that are optimized for the EXACT keywords or advertising creatives that deliver traffic.

For example, if you are selling really big widgets you might target "Huge Widgets" and "Giant Widgets" in your Adwords campaign.  To keep the searchers mind in gear you can have separate landing pages for each of those search terms.  These unique landing pages usually have higher conversion rates and higher Adwords quality scores.  The financial difference can be enormous.

Some sites have hundreds of landing pages for a single product - each identically matched for specific search queries.  These pages are often generated by using a program to place each of the keywords in the cookie-cutter template.

Although these pages will be on your domain they are not part of your indexed website and may be blocked from accidental indexing by robots.txt.

[MBayes]

In our experience if you are going to have more than a few landing pages (for whatever reason)  don't optimize them, and do "blocked from accidental indexing by robots.txt"  As EGOL  states.  You will find yourself in Optimization heck if you have a bunch of pages fighting for the same basic keywords.

[BlueBird33]

Correct. The landing pages do not link to the website or any other pages.

They are stand alone pages with double opt-in webform for them to submit their information.

[BlueBird33]

Lead generation for real estate investments.

Ads are created and uploaded in-house.

urls are keyword rich too.

Links, of course, are not optimized, becase there are no links.

[BlueBird33]

Yeah. I hear what you are saying about variations on the same keywords.

These landing pages are different types of investments. Luckily the keywords are different, like widgets and gadgets instead of huge widgets and large widgets.

We will watch to see if the pages are blocked or not.

[BlueBird33]

Looks like we have some "testing" of the landing pages to do.