How to Create High Ranking Marketo Landing Pages

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Marketo landing pages have become one of the most vital lead generation tools in today’s marketing landscape. However, many marketers are yet to harness the complete potential of landing pages.
Today, we’ll discuss how to optimize the Marketo landing pages to maximize lead generation.

Understanding Marketo Landing Page Form

When you start creating a landing page on Marketo, you’ll get to choose from two options:
a) Start with a Marketo Free-Form landing page
b) Use the Marketo Guided Landing Page

The free-form landing page offers you virtually infinite options of things that you can do. Marketo free form landing pages give you complete freedom to customize your landing page any way you want to. However, you must have prior knowledge of HTML and CSS. On top of that, you’ll also need to be familiar with the variables and specific rules of Marketo. If coding is not your strong suit, you may not want to go for free-form landing pages. Moreover, you’ll need to create responsive landing pages on your own. Free-form pages aren’t responsive by default.

If you want to create responsive landing pages in Marketo without breaking a sweat, choose guided landing pages. Simply put, guided landing pages are a simplified version of free-form pages. Guided landing pages are responsive right from the word go, completely prepared, and ready to be used right out of the box. You simply need to put the images and content that you want, and you are good to go. Guided landing pages are best suited for startups and individuals who are yet to implement a complete marketing solution. Guided landing pages are not as versatile as free-form pages. In the long run, you must move from guided landing pages to free-form landing pages.

And now, we are going to talk about optimizing Marketo landing pages, and this is where things get interesting. There are two sides to landing page optimization. One is from the SERP perspective and the other one is from the readers’ perspective.

We are going to cover the SERP perspective of Marketon landing page optimization first. Why are we covering it first? You’ll know in a moment.

Optimizing Marketo Landing Page for SERPs

In the cutthroat competition going on in the digital world, many brands struggle to find a space on the first page of the search engine result pages. Securing a position in the top 3-5 links of the first page is even harder. So, creating a landing page that is optimized for SERPs is really necessary if you want to be seen by your audience. Reading comes secondary here, the primary goal is to be visible.

So, let’s see how to optimize a landing page on Marketo for SEO:

Create a Responsive Landing Page

This is by far the more important and first step of effective digital marketing for any web page. And yet, there are many instances where we’ve seen a non-responsive web page that just looks completely out of the place.

Google’s search algorithm looks for mobile-optimized web pages first, and if you are not creating a responsive web page, it will have a direct or indirect impact on your overall ranking. So, if you are choosing free-form landing pages in Marketo, don’t forget to choose the responsive design. Make your landing page mobile-first, make it responsive, and then proceed with what we’ll cover in the next step. If you chose a guided landing page, then you don’t need to worry about making the landing page responsive. That’s because guided landing pages on Marketo are responsive by default.

Use Strategic Keywords

Keywords play a vital role in helping search engines identify the content on your web page and retrieve it on the result page (s). This is why you need to invest a good amount of time in brainstorming the right keywords. Keyword Planner and keyword search tools allow you to find the search queries and relevant keywords that you should focus on. In this step, there are two important things that you need to focus on:

a) Create a complete SEO strategy with a digital marketing team that’s well-versed with how SEO works. The key lies in understanding whether the team is updating its SEO knowledge.

b) Listen to your audience before you start speaking to them. Analyze what words and search queries your target audience uses. Using their natural language will allow you to be more approachable, create personalized content and spark faster communication.

Listening to your audience will also help you understand their requirements and pain points. This will help you make informed decisions in creating the right message for them. At the same time, you’ll also know what relevant keywords you should include in your landing page copy. The more relevant information you have in the copy, the more relevant data search engines will have to cawl, which will, in turn, increase the chances of improving the ranking of your Marketo landing page.

Include the Best Keywords in the URL

Using the top-performing keyword in your landing page URL brings you the best of both worlds: the reader world and the SEO world. First of all, search engines will be able to crawl through the top-performing keyword right away (crawlers/spider bots crawl through the URLs first), increasing your chances of an improved ranking.

At the same time, when your audience sees the URL, they clearly know what to expect in the landing page content. It sets the right expectations, which is a vital user experience parameter.

Do You Even Meta?

People with the slightest knowledge of HTML or digital marketing know what metadata is and why it is important. Let’s first see the simple steps to create metadata for a landing page in Marketo.

When you start at the Landing Page in Marketo, choose “Action” and select the “Edit Page Meta Tags”

This is where you’ll get fields such as Title, Keywords, and description. Fill in the information, save the changes and you are good to proceed.

To understand why metadata is important, let’s take a look at the two key components of metadata: meta title and meta description.

Meta title consists of the subject matter of the landing page content. This way, the browsers and search engines will be able to read what the content is about.

Meta description elaborates the idea in the title along with telling your audience about your USP or an offer, whatever relevant and/catchy information you want to convey right away.

Leaving meta description makes you lose an opportunity to use a focus keyword in the right way. Moreover, it also leaves a bad impression on your audience because they won’t be able to identify you.

Follow and Index

In the same “Edit Page Meta Tags” option, you’ll see a section named “Robots.” in this section, click on the list and select the “follow index” option. If you publish your Marketo landing pages without choosing this option, search engines won’t be able to crawl them. As a result, and they won’t appear in SERPs.

You can refer to the Google Search Console Help for more information on this.

Optimize Images for Mobile Devices

Marketo landing page editor has predefined image size. The length and width parameters can be made responsive, though. All you need to do is enter the WYSIWYG editor. Select an image and click on its icon, change the height to “Auto” and width to “100%” for optimum output.

Important Tip: Check your landing page for various devices to see how they appear on different devices (computers, mobiles, tablets, etc.)

Use Keywords in Header Tags

If you take a good look at the structure of this blog, you’ll notice that it is divided into headings and subheadings. Structuring a webpage in this format has dual benefits:
a) Headings and subheadings give a clean and structured look to the document, which offers good browsing and reading experience to the readers.
b) Header tags allow search engine crawlers to index the page properly.

Keeping the SEO perspective in mind, header tags become even more so important. Let’s see how to optimize header tags with keywords.

tags headlight the subject matter of the landing page. So, you must include the primary keyword in the H1 tag. Next, use subsequent keywords in the H2 and H3 tags. Here’s the order of precedence

H1 >H2 > H3 and so so on.

Primarily, you won’t need to go beyond H3 tags. However, if you do, H4 you can include LSI or longtail keywords there.

Take this write-up, for instance, the title of the page is created in the H1 tag, followed by the H2 and H3 tags for subsequent subheadings.

Just to help you remember: header tags improve readability and reinforce keywords in a landing page. Never overlook tags.

Add Keywords to Image Alt Tags

Whatever text you put in your images, search engines can’t read it, it’s for human eyes only. So how would you inform the search engines about the content in the image? That’s what alt tags are for.

This is also an opportunity to include your primary keyword in a productive way. Add your primary keyword in the Image Description field of the Rich Text Editor in Marketo Landing Page builder.

Mind Your Links

A landing page has to have a Call to Action button. Be it a sign-up request, a Request a Call/Demo, Schedule a Metting, or whatever, if the link to the button doesn’t work, all the hard work done till now goes in vain. Make sure all the links that you include on the landing page work. Fixing broken links also helps you minimize bounce rates.

Other Methods of Maximizing Marketo Landing Page Conversions

SEO is all about making your Marketo landing page rank high on search engine result pages. It’s just the first step. Now, it’s time to view your Marketo landing page from the reader’s perspective.

Prepare good content

We have seen many landing pages that are remarkably designed but have a poor copy. Copywriting is what engages the audience. When you are investing so much time and effort in the landing page design, poor copywriting brings all your efforts down. It’s a recipe for disaster. Create content that adds value to the reading experience.

Keep tabs on CRM and analytics

With Marketo CRM at your disposal, you’ll be able to track all your leads easily and efficiently. At the same time, analytics will help you see how your landing page and its marketing campaigns are performing. Analytics will give you the facts and figures to tweak your approach.

Conclusion

Creating a landing page on Marketo can’t be termed as an easy or difficult thing to do. It’s not about the difficulty, but how well you understand the platform and the concept of Landing pages. Sure, a little knowledge about SEO goes a long way, but keeping up with the updates of the SEO world requires a lot of dedication. Although we have discussed the best techniques for building landing pages in Marketo, the best thing to do is to consult with digital marketing experts and leverage their experience to create a high-ranking, conversion-optimized landing page with Marketo.