SEO vs Landing Page/Sales Funnel Services
“Does having a website on a [Sales Funnel/Landing Page service] but with your own custom domain make SEO crap?”…
That was the question I saw last night in a large Digital Marketing Facebook group that I follow.
In typical fashion an onslaught of answers began flooding in and within the comments I noticed a few people sharing their take on it.
Among some of those comments were a few people incorrectly stating that “it doesn’t matter what platform you use. Google don’t want to get in side your coding”.
Of course this is empirically wrong. Just as I did in that post’s comment thread, I wanted to quickly provide you with 3 ways in which Google and other search engines cares about your website with respect to SEO.
Before we get to the three points, it’s imperative for you to know that Google deeply cares about your websites code. This is why they encourage you to use “structured data” and meta tags to define and explain your website and page content.
Secondly, you should really think of SEO as a three level approach.
1. Front-end — On page, keyword centric factors…
2. Backend or Technical — Code related, server related, page speed…
3. Ephemeral or Referral — linking and social signals
Also with respect to Landing Page services, while they give you the ability to quickly create beautiful Optin landing pages or Sales Funnels they are not that great for the purposes of SEO.
This is because they only give you limited access to manipulate the surface level of your landing page aka the “Front-end”, which is typically manipulated and built through drag-and-drop page builders.
Of course the Ephemeral/Referral aspect of SEO is more of an existential factor that lies outside of a platform or landing page service but if you’re worried about SEO your best bet is using a more proven platform like WordPress.
Within my own Digital Agency and with all of my clients, I use WordPress on the website’s root domain as the platform of choice. This give us full control to develop content marketing strategies that we can optimize for SEO, which we know will rank higher in search engines.
We then leverage the power of Landing/Optin pages and Sales Funnels using sub-domains.
This way there is a clear separation of SEO Optimized Content vs Lead Generation/Sales Funnel Specific content.
Thats not to say you can’t integrate lead aggregation tools into your SEO optimized pages by using tools like OptinMonster, Thrive Leads, etc… but by doing things this way you’re able to separate both systems, while allowing them to work in harmony with another.
In our experience taking this approach also makes website and tooling management much easier to manage and navigate.
Last but not least, with regards to SEO, it’s also important for you to know that SEO is a slow and ongoing process.
I hope that helps and if you have any questions or need help with your digital marketing, website, or branding, feel free to reach out :)
Cheers!
Corey
