While browsing over the latest Website Magazine, I happen upon an article titled «Landing Pages: SEO vs. SEM.» I first think to myself, «gee, isn’t the argument over by now?» It’s really common knowledge that SEO and PPC need to work together to be of greatest benefit. Alas, the article wasn’t against SEO as much as I thought it was going to be, but it was a little off in its whole idea.

Basically, the author noted how SEO is used for broad searches and to pull in a wider audience, and lacked in pulling targeted audiences to properly optimized landing pages. This, believes the auther, is where PPC comes in. Bah! Organic SEO can, and when appropriately implemented is indeed a viable solution in regard to landing pages.

The SEO E-Commerce Experience
The First thing that caught my eye was this quote

«Most search engines look at a site’s home page first and rank it as the most important page based on the relevancy of search queries…

…Overall, this makes organic landing pages more general, not driven by conversion rates. The main goal of these pages is site ranking and visibility — great for marketing to new visitors or casual browsers but not so good for a customer looking for a specific item or service.»

The first statement is true, but the second has nothing to do with the first. Together, and in the context that they were written, they make a very inaccurate statement.

Yes, the home page targets broader terms. This is indeed to appeal to a larger audience. But the homepage is less often meant for a landing page for the customer looking for something specific. I will expand on this in just one moment. First, more from the original article.

Faulty Example
I wanted to hold off on explaining the landing page thing because it relates to an example that the author gives. He brings up Zappos.com for his case. Apparently, this is a big online dealer of shoes (forgive me for not doing my total research, but it’s Saturday). The author states that the homepage was optimized with the title for shoe terms. Details on what it actually took for the site to rank so highly aside, the site indeed ranks for the broad term «shoes» in Google. This is a great SEO success indeed. However, this is not an issue of organic landing pages vs. paid landing pages. This is a case of something else entirely.

First, because the page ranks so highly for the term «shoes,» they should probably capitalize on that just a bit more. I didn’t see attention given to shoes until below the fold. It seems that Zappos has decided to branch into other products over the years, but it may not be a good idea to change the focus of the homepage in regard to optimization and term targeting. Instead, they need to worry about working with where they are. Let’s leave more of that for another blog post.

The premise of the example given is that someone doing a specific search would not convert well provided this landing page. This is true because of the reasons I just mentioned, among others. However, «shoes» isn’t exactly a specific search. It’s a very broad search. Instead, the term «mens working shoes» would be specific. If there is a page for that specific term, and proper optimization has been implemented, then that will be the page that is return in the SERPs. We could then optimize the page’s converting factors.

So you see, this isn’t a case of whether or not PPC or SEO is best suited. And the statement that organic SEO is not suited for driving qualified, converting traffic to landing pages is simply incorrect. On the contrary, we should be making use of long tail terms to drive the right traffic to the right places on our site.

Don’t Hit Me
If it sounds like I’m flaming Aaron Kupferberg (the author of the original article), it is simply because I am, admittedly, a poor blogger. Instead, I hope that the tone of education comes across, as that is indeed the whole point of this blog.

Quite honestly, as I stated earlier, Aaron is the Art Director and Interaction Designer for Didit. To see such a grasp (however much I disagree) on the topic of SEO and PPC from a non-SEO makes me very happy indeed. Good on ya, Aaron.

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