You’ve worked extremely hard to create engaging Marketo landing pages. How can you ensure that they’re delivering the best possible organic search rankings?

Search engines overwhelmingly favor content that’s built in a technically accurate manner. Your Marketo landing pages must cater to this requirement.

Optimizing Your Marketo Landing Pages: A Step-by-Step Guide

1. Let Strategic Keywords Serve as Your Content’s Foundation

Do you need your landing pages to rank high in search engine results pages (SERPS)? Your work begins before you ever log into Marketo.

Keywords are used by search engines to identify and retrieve specific pages. If you want people to find your landing pages, then you need to choose the right keywords with a tool like Google AdWords’ Keyword Planner tool. After you’ve determined which search queries and keywords to target, you can create your content to match.

Learn From Those Who Know

Does your company have a mature SEO program complete with a keyword strategy? Then refer to them first. Follow their recommendations to ensure your content is relevant and supports their domain and page authority goals.

Speak Your Audience’s Language

Focus on using keywords and phrases that your customers and prospects naturally use. By sounding like your audience, you’ll spark more social media conversations, get more conversions on your landing pages, and build critical SEO authority.

Focusing on your audience’s language and pain points should automatically align you with the keyword strategy chosen by your SEO team since people typically type into search engines the phrases that they are most familiar with.

2. Include Your Best Keywords in URLs

URLs aren’t just for helping people access your site more easily than they could if they had to remember complicated IP address. Search engines also use them to discover what different pages contain.

Adding primary keywords to your URLs helps humans and machines contextualize and find your pages. Maintain readability by using hyphens to separate the individual terms.

Enter your primary keywords in Marketo’s “Page URL” field.

3. Never Skip the Metadata

HTML uses certain tags to provide metadata or supplemental information that describes the data your page shows visitors. Metadata tags clarify the contents of landing pages.

There are various forms of meta elements with distinct attributes, or name-value pairs. Two critical meta tags that you can’t afford to overlook are the <title> and <meta description> specifications.

The title tells search engines and browsers about your content’s subject matter. The meta description provides the text that appears in search engine results pages or SERPs. Are you in a hurry to publish a landing page before a looming deadline? It’s still worth taking the time to set these tags.

Most users never notice the differences that meta data makes. Unless you include the tags so that search engines can index your content, however, people will never find your pages in the first place.

Start at the Marketo landing page. Select “Action,” and then choose the “Edit Page Meta Tags” option.

Title

Create a title that uses your primary keyword in a sentence. At most, this should be 60 characters long. Each page must have a unique title.

Close-up view of the Title field in Marketo.

Meta Description

The meta description is a 160-character description drives clicks by summarizing your landing page.

Close-up view of the Meta Description field in Marketo.

For more insights, check out Marketo’s Landing Page Titles and Metadata guide.

4. Make Search Engine Robots “Follow” and “Index” Your Landing Page

Once your landing page is ready to publish, change the status from “nofollow,” “noindex” to “follow index.” This allows search engines to crawl your landing page, index and display them in SERP results. Very short-term landing pages are the only ones that you shouldn’t index.

Add instructions for search engine robots using the “Robots” field in Marketo’s “Edit Page Meta Tags” option.

Confused about how to direct robots with meta tags? Google Search Console Help offers a good explanation.

5. Setup Image Rendering for Mobile Platforms

When you use Marketo’s landing page editor to insert images, it fixes static width and height parameters by default. To make sizing more responsive, select an image and click on its icon in the WYSIWYG editor. Set the width to “100%” and the height to “Auto” for the best results.

Responsive landing pages improve your SERP rankings. Be mindful of how different mobile devices render your visual content.

6. Use Keywords in Header Tags

Header HTML tags can heighten your SEO keyword ranking:

• <h1> tags are the most critical because they highlight your page’s subject matter. They should contain your primary keyword.
• Search engines give prevalence to header tags in numerical order. For instance, <h1> receives more significance than <h2>, which is more significant than <h3>.
• Individual landing pages fare better with at least one <h1> tag and multiple other header tags as necessary.

H1

 

H2

 

H3

 

Choose relevant header tags to improve readability and subtly reinforce keywords.

7. Add Keywords to HTML Image Tag Alt Attributes

Search engine crawlers can’t read images. Instead, they use each tag‘s attributes to glean information about its contents.

In addition to designating alternate text in case, the browser can’t display an image for some reason, the  “alt” parameter helps search engines understand your landing pages. These attributes function best when they include relevant keywords.

You should tie your  tag “alt” attributes to your primary keywords, as seen here:

Define “alt” image attributes in the Rich Text Editor’s “Image Description” field.

8. Redirect Broken Links

When you’re browsing the web, nothing’s worse than clicking a promising link only to discover that it’s broken. Your creative assets are bound to evolve, however. As they change and migrate, your page links might break.

Why eliminate broken links? This simple cleanup procedure lowers bounce rates, which equates to higher SERP rankings.

Need help finding a page’s broken elements? Use the Google Webmasters suite’s 301 redirect method to repair problems.

Sharpen Your Marketo Landing Page SEO Skills

Now that you have a better handle on refining content with Marketo, you can apply these techniques. Of course, this is easier said than done when you need to generate a significant quantity of SEO-optimized, responsive landing pages.

Marketo provides guided landing page templates and other handy tools that can help you improve organic results. When you’re tasked with deploying legions of content, however, even the best hands-on guides might fall short.

Explore Additional Resources

Learn more on how to select the right CMS for your business and excel the Digital Experience.

Our team specializes in Marketo audits that help our clients identify performance problems with their integrated Marketo platforms.

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Chat with our specialists about the nuances of launching flawless Marketo landing pages. From helping you customize your branding to achieving design consistency, TA Digital can help. Visit us online to learn more.