Why Landing Pages Matter

As consumers continue to ask more complex questions, it is critical to optimize your brand to become more discoverable, answer the questions consumers ask, and drive a seamless customer journey. Enhancing your website with landing pages should be a key part of your strategy to capture your customers at their moments of highest intent.

Key Terms

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — The process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine.

Landing Page — A web page built to capture specific intent in search. This can be a location, product, service, event, job, and more.

Schema.org Markup — A joint effort (through collaboration of the search engines) to improve the web by creating a structured data markup schema. Web developers can use this universal vocabulary by embedding it in the HTML of a page to communicate to search engines universally. On-page markup helps search engines understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results.

Content Management System (CMS) — An application used for web development that allows content creators to produce, edit, and publish text or images to a website. A traditional CMS includes a backend and front end display; a headless CMS only includes the backend structure, not visual display.

Featured Snippet — Google search results with additional data displayed. This extra data is usually pulled from Structured Data found in a page's HTML. Common types include reviews, recipes, and events.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP) — The pages displayed by search engines in response to a query by a searcher. These can include links, listings, or other rich content.

How Search Engines Work

Every time you search, there are thousands — sometimes millions — of web pages with helpful information. Search engines discover, understand, and organize content on the internet to offer the most relevant results to the questions searchers are asking. This process takes three steps:

Crawling

This is the process where search engine robots (also called spiders or web crawlers) find documents (unique URLs) on the Internet and catalog the code and content on each URL.

To be most effective, the crawling process begins by finding a robots.txt file, which tells search engine crawlers which pages or files they can or can't request from your site. As the crawlers visit websites, they use links on those sites to discover other pages. The software pays special attention to new sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links.

Yext recommends registering your sites directly with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools and providing the sitemap to facilitate the crawling process.

Indexing

Crawled data is then stored in the search engine's index. In order for results to be returned in search, the content must first be indexed.

When crawlers find a webpage, Google's systems render the content of the page just as a browser does, making note of key signals from keywords to website freshness. The Google Search index contains hundreds of billions of web pages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size.

Ranking

Relevant content in the index is then returned based on a user's query, with the most relevant and trustworthy content appearing higher on the SERP.

Google sorts through hundreds of billions of webpages to find the most relevant, useful results in a fraction of a second. Their ranking systems are made up of hundreds of algorithms. Factors may include the words of your query, relevance and meaning of the query, expertise of sources, usability of pages, your location, and settings.

Consumer Behavior in Search

Consumers have been retrained to ask questions instead of searching for keywords. They are asking longer, more complex questions as they go through their buying journey. These questions are more precise, which reveals the consumer's intent.

Previously, customers used to search for things like "hotels in Manhattan." Now, they are searching for things like "best hotels in NYC that allow dogs."

Search drives 62% of traffic to a brand's website. This means the majority of consumers going to websites are landing there from search — so it's important that websites are positioned to perform well in organic search.

Buying paid ads for these high-intent, long-tail searches is not scalable. The only way to optimize for them is through a scalable technology that builds unique landing pages based on your content. Consider a search like:

"Car insurance agent 10011 open now who speaks English"

For a global insurance agency, this single query type could represent millions of long-tail permutations:

[insurance specialty] × [insurance agent] × [zip code/city/state] × [hours] × [languages spoken]

When people ask these intent-filled questions in search, they expect to land on clear, specific pages with the information they're looking for. Consumers now expect to find clear calls to action, detailed answers to their search, and a seamless experience. When consumers have a bad experience, they are likely to bounce and visit another site.

Why Landing Pages Are Important

Landing pages help to capture consumers' specific intent based on what they are actually searching for. These searches can capture any sort of intent — searches for businesses, jobs, products, services, activities, and more.

Here's a specific example — a page built to answer "urgent care near me open now":

Optimized landing pages provide value in three ways:

1. They help your brand's performance in search. Good landing pages are built to be discoverable in search. This is critical because search drives 62% of your website traffic.
2. They provide a great experience to consumers. Landing pages are built to be found and provide specific information that consumers are looking for, helping streamline the customer journey.
3. They increase customer conversion. Driving a seamless consumer experience where they can find the answers they need and easily take action helps decrease bounce rates and increase conversion.

How Landing Pages Work

The standard digital journey has become long and complex. Traditionally, consumers enter a complex search, are driven to a website, then need to explore the website to find what they are looking for, and then hopefully find an action to take.

Standard: Digital journeys are long and may lose customers before they take action.

Goal: Landing pages should lead customers directly to a point of action.

Introduction to Yext Pages

There are two parts to SEO — the strategy and the science. The science includes the things that we know lead to good performance in search: structured data, page speed, content delivery, continuous updates, responsive design, analytics, and more. The strategy is the content, visual design, and copywriting.

Yext provides the science so customers can focus on the strategy. Hundreds of optimizations are automatically baked into every Yext Page. Whether a customer uses an in-house SEO team, an agency, or Yext Professional Services to deploy their strategy, every Yext Page has the science of SEO built in.

How Yext Pages Work with the Knowledge Graph

Yext helps you build a strong, organic foundation to answer your customers' questions. With the Yext platform, you can generate Pages that capture all of the different customer intents across search engines like Google and Bing — covering locations, jobs, services, events, professionals, FAQs, and more.

The key is the ability to store the public facts about your business in the Yext Knowledge Graph. In the Knowledge Graph you build out the entities that become your landing pages, and leverage it as the interface to quickly and easily make updates, changes, or additions to those pages.

Examples of landing page types built with Yext Pages:

Product page:

Location page:

Professional page:

How Yext Pages Integrate with Your CMS

Yext Pages and a CMS work together because Yext Pages are built to perform well in search, capturing traffic from search engines and driving more customers to a website. A CMS focuses on managing the website itself — the homepage, navigation, online ordering, appointment booking, payment processing, and logged-in experiences.

Brands can keep using their current CMS to manage their website. Yext Pages supercharge existing presence and provide a way for the customer's website to perform better in search and bring more traffic. Yext Pages are set up via subdomain and are built to match the look and feel of a customer's website so that the end consumer has a seamless experience.

The Benefits of Yext Pages

• Capture Traffic — Yext Pages are structured for the new customer journey and are built to perform in search.
• Drive Conversion — Pages offer clear calls to action, are available for any category/entity, and provide analytics to continually optimize your strategy.
• Operate Efficiently — Yext Pages are built for marketers. They are easy to update and easy to build, so your team can constantly optimize your site to achieve business goals.