How to Design Website Landing Pages in WordPress and Why

When it comes to “landing pages” people either do not know what that means or have some vague understanding of what that term landing page means when it comes to websites.

Most people think that by just having a website itself is all that is needed to reach the world with their store front and communicate what they do or offer to the world.

Yes, a website is essential to show off and communicate what you have to offer but you can do so much more with this tool called a website. This landing page tool is basically built in to the website you already have.

If your website has been designed on a WordPress platform it is very easy to make one or a whole series of landing pages to help your business grow in ways only you can think of. The use for landing pages is almost endless but I will give you a few reasons to spark your imagination to get your creative juices rolling.

What is a website landing page?

This page is designed off your website to be a stand-alone website page independent of the parent website itself. It is not a page that will be connected to the menu in the main parent website itself. It will have all the same characteristics of the main website when it comes to color, fonts and image usage so you will want to make it consistent to the parent website, so you do not confuse potential clients or people.

What are landing pages used for? More Internet Reach of course!

It’s a way for taking your website places it could not go to before. When you put a focus key phrase on a particular website page your internet reach for your website becomes very narrow. Landing pages opens up the internet for more creative use by you and your website.

Landing pages are basically a CTA (Call To Action). Just like you may have inside your website with a CTA button taking someone to a specific location a landing page does the same thing only in a larger sense.

Here are Just A Few Landing Page Uses

• Special offer. Something that you are promoting that has a start and end date.
• Email address collection.
• Reaching more locations such as states and cities.
• Types of products that are offered.

Once you get the idea or concept of landing pages the whole world will open up on how to promote yourself or business.

One Word Of Caution

Search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo do not like duplicate content on website pages unless that page points back to a parent page.

You do this in one of two ways.

The first way is by using a Website Canonical (referring to) from a landing page to the parent page. When it comes to WordPress, I use a plugin called Yoast to do this. Yoast is one of the best WordPress plugins that you can use, and its SEO usage is the only one I have come to rely on all my websites I designs.

The FREE version of this plugin is all I use on many of my websites but I sometime purchase the more advanced version for $89 a year when I have websites that need more of a SEO punch. That version lets me set up 5 Focus Key Phrases instead of just one.

** Remember you can only use one focus key phrase on a website and that phrase should also show up in the URL for that page. Yoast will let you know if you have used that focus key phrase in another location on the whole website. The reason you should only use a focus key phrase on a website is because it confuses search engines and they do not know where to point so they end up not ranking that page at all. We want to make life easy for search engines. 

Not only is Yoast an amazing tool when setting up SEO for a particular page but it has many other features that are very useful. One is the placement of a canonical for a landing page that will point back to the parent page and all its content.

Below are two photographs on how that is done inside of the Yoast plugin.

The second way of having a page point back to the parent page is by…

…design a Landing Page that feeds off the Parent Page.

WordPress makes this easy to do.

You do this by setting up a main parent page first and then make landing pages that point to that particular parent page.

Once your parent page has been published with all its content and SEO, it will then show up in the Page Attributes on the far right of the tool bar. If these landing pages are being made to show up on search engines for different states or cities, then you want to make your Focus Key Phrase more basic like I did here for this wedding photographer.

The parent page SEO was just Wedding Photography. It will show up in the URL as  /wedding-photography/

The Page attribute is (no parent). That is because it is the parent page.

I then went and made a page to be used as a landing page for the city of Phoenix. I use a theme that lets me save whole pages as a template, so I take the parent page I designed and load it up on this landing page.  The focus key phrase would then be Phoenix Wedding Photographer.

  ** Do not publish this page…

…until you have the following steps done or your URL will be wrong.

Put Phoenix Wedding Photographer in the SEO title, meta description and focus key phrase but in the SLUG you will just put the word phoenix in lower case letters. Go over to the right-hand side where the Page Attributes are located and click the down arrow to Wedding Photographer.

This is how the landing page will know what it will connect to. I then go into the content of the page and where ever you originally had just wedding photography you want it to say Phoenix Wedding Photography including the title. Your title should be the H1 tag.

Remember a page can only have one H1 tag but you can have many H2, H3, H4 or H5 tags as you want to break up the text as in sub-titles. More than one H1 tag also confuses the search engines.

When all that is done you can then publish your landing page.

It will show up in the URL as: /wedding-photography/phoenix/

I will then take this landing page technique and change the city over and over until I have as many cities that I want his website to show up on Google and Bing searches. You can also use it to promote different products or promotions. 

Do not forget to send a sitemap to Google Console and Bing Webmaster Tools so those two search engines will index and crawl your website with the new changes right away instead of when they get around to which in many cases takes weeks.

The website that I used for this demonstration was for a photographer by the name of Jason Tarr of Beyond The Shutter Photography. You can see his whole landing page link right here and look at the landing page itself.

https://bts.photography/wedding-photographer/phoenix/  

Go here if you would like Best Website Solutions to Design Website Landing Pages for you.

Go here if you would like to watch a how-to YouTube video on How to Design Website Landing Pages in WordPress and Why directly below. 

How to Design Website Landing Pages in WordPress and Why