2023 has kicked off, and many predict it will be the year of organic marketing.
61% of marketers say their top priority for 2023 is to grow their organic presence online through SEO. According to the same Hubspot survey, just under half of all marketers say that keyword optimisation will be a top priority.
As the threat of targeting limitations loom and the cost to acquire customers increases, enterprise marketers plan to spend less on paid ads in 2023, shifting their budgets to organic marketing in the hope of regaining some certainty.
One Neil Patel survey found that 68% of companies say they will increase their SEO budget in 2023 because it offers a better ROI than paid ads.
In addition, 61% of online businesses plan to increase their overall UX/CRO budget to combat the rising cost of ads and because UX is an important part of the overall marketing experience.
With more marketers planning to spend more on SEO and online shopping in 2023, the organic space is becoming more competitive. Any business wanting to grow must build landing pages that target high-intent keywords at scale and display content exactly how users expect to find it.
What is the secret to a solid product listing page in 2023?
The catch: it’s not enough to simply build product listing pages in the hope of improving your SEO performance.
“Search quality is one of the major trends we are seeing in e-commerce,” CEO at Toloka, Olga Megorskaya said. “Online marketplaces and retailers are discovering that up to 5% of gross merchandise volume depends on the quality of product search and recommendations.” (Forbes, 3 E-Commerce Trends To Watch In 2023)
The conversion power of a page relies on its relevance and scalability.
Getting the UX right with one page and then replicating it across tens of thousands of pages (not dozens) is the secret sauce to eCommerce success.
So it presents a fork in the road for enterprise eCommerce businesses wanting to expand their reach: Should you build or buy these thousands of landing pages?
In this blog post, we’ll compare the difference between the two:
- Do you build these landing pages yourself?
- Do you have the resources to build them?
- Can you constantly optimise and monitor performance?
- Do you have the data to know which keywords to target, and which to avoid?
- If a page stops performing, can you switch it out for another page and keyword opportunity quickly?
- Is it more viable to buy?
- Can you outperform SEO with bought pages?
- We’ll use the Longtail UX Customer Acquisition Platform to illustrate what this looks like.
What is a product landing page?
So, you have your standard product landing page. With a product heading, benefits, social proof, product description etc.
They’re great for promoting single products linked to a SERP or Google ad.
But for capturing demand at scale in eCommerce, the best landing page is a multi-product landing page.
And to truly dominate SERPs and accelerate ROI, you’re going to need thousands of them.
What is a multi-product landing page?
As you might have guessed, multi-product landing pages display multiple matching products for any given search term on one page (unlike most product landing pages promoting only a single product, or even category landing pages promoting several products within a category).
But there’s more to it…
There are two critical conditions for capturing the demand of your target audience with landing pages:
- You can only scale if you know how to identify and target your long tail – the keywords your market is using right now to find exactly what they want in just a few clicks.
- A high-converting and high-performing landing page displays only products that are an exact match (or as close as possible) to the search term.
Here’s the difference between a single, multi-product, and exact match multi-product landing page:
Why an exact match multi-product landing page is the best landing page
Multi-product landing pages that show only exact match products:
- Boost your conversions by up to 10% or more and as high as 60%.
- Reduce your customer acquisition cost by up 60%
- 40% of customers repeat buy
- See a 40%+ uplift in your non-brand traffic.
Multi-product landing pages displaying exact-match products are the key to scaling your reach and capturing the longtail demand of your target audience.
The question is: can you afford to build the pages in-house?
Here’s what you can expect if you (or your engineering team) prefer to do all the heavy lifting yourselves.
How to create multiple landing pages that capture demand: Build
What is build?
Build is the DIY product landing page solution that captures the demand currently escaping you. But it’s nowhere near as easy as it sounds.
Instead of outsourcing, you use the organisation’s internal skills, people, and budget to create, measure and optimise pages for the longtail.
What building thousands of multi-product landing pages yourself looks like
- Initial research: calling on your engineering, marketing, SEO and product teams – and Google Analytics – locate the category opportunities already on your site but unrealised
- Keyword research: gather a list of at least 10,000 high-quality long tail keywords that meet the criteria of the categories you want to reach – use a keyword research tool like SEMrush or Ubersuggest. And keep in mind that voice search has made keywords longer and higher intent).
- Approval: You present the data to the CFO – they’ll want to know how much it will cost, the time it will take and the resources it will consume.
- Submit your ticket: you put in your request to engineering for the landing pages to be built
- Page building: creating one professional-looking landing page could take a few hours to a day, a few days, or a few weeks. It all depends on the ability of your team and the number of keywords you want to target.
- Design (including landing page copy)could take anywhere from 15 to 80 hours;
- Development – 24-80 hours;
- DevOps – 8-24 hours;
- QA (Quality Assurance) – 8-16 hours.
Even if your team can create 1000, 5000, or 10,000 multi-product landing pages, they’re likely to take up to 12 months to be indexed and ranked.
The hardest part of building
The hardest part of building your own pages is measuring the results. Sure, you can see where your pages rank in search engines, but can you trace your conversion rates with complete accuracy?
A great result would be 5% of your landing pages on page 1. With good targeting, 1% might get to position 1. (In this instance, Mitre 10 achieved 10% of their landing pages ranking on page 1).
Any page below position 9 was probably a waste of your time and money, and you should find another keyword to replace it.
Building high-converting, multi-product landing pages at scale is incredibly hard to pull off.
You can see why these projects get pushed aside:
- They don’t scale quickly enough.
- The burden on your budget and team is too great.
- Relying on your own metrics, there’s no way to honestly know how successful each landing page is and your ROI.
- You need to factor in the resources required for daily optimisation to keep up with shifting trends and low-performing pages.
Can AI build multi-product landing pages for you?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is rapidly advancing in 2023, bringing products like ChatGPT and Bold360 to the forefront of online marketing.
In fact, 97% of retailers admit they plan to use AI as part of their tech stack by 2023.
There is little doubt AI is emerging as a major driving force behind the growth of eCommerce. But the question remains: Is it possible for bots to generate thousands of multi-product landing pages that each target a different long tail keyword?
The answer is yes, but it would require a significant amount of training data and a clear understanding of the structure and format of the landing pages, as well as the full list of long tail keywords you want to target.
Most importantly, at the stage the technology is in right now, you can’t rely upon the quality and relevance of the generated content – it will vary depending on your review and editing.
Creating high-converting multi-product landing pages: Buy
What is buy?
This is where you pass the task of producing landing pages at scale to a third party, like Longtail UX. Instead of draining internal resources, you lean on the expertise and skills of those who specialise in capturing category demand.
What buy looks like
Defining your categories and establishing your search opportunities:
- Your Customer Acquisition Strategy
✓ We learn the categories most important to you
✓ We uncover the non-brand search gaps in your current site structure
Then, we create a strategy for the design and deployment of your multi-product LUX Smart Pages.
- In-depth keyword research
✓ Your product feed and Google Suite Data are ingested into the LUX system so that we can identify the biggest growth opportunities for new customer acquisitions.
✓ We pull out hundreds of thousands of search terms with a beneficial monthly demand.
✓ Our LUX ranking checker analyses each piece of data to make sure we’re not targeting a keyword you already rank for. From here, we send the full keyword list for feedback and/or approval.
- LUX Smart Page Template Creation
✓ Our in-house engineers create the template for your LUX Smart Pages.
n.b. Longtail UX doesn’t create any content. We only use the content in your current feed.
✓ Most LUX Smart Pages look and operate just like your PLPs.
Everything is approved by you before the LUX Smart Pages go live!
- Launch day: the part where you start winning new customers
It’s time to launch your LUX Smart Pages.
✓ Your LUX Organic Smart Pages come with a unique site map (created by Longtail UX’s engineers), ready to be uploaded into your Google Search Console.
✓ Humans and Google love LUX Smart Pages so much, they index faster and rank higher, so you can start winning new customers straight away.
- Daily testing and optimisation
We never stop testing and optimising your LUX Smart Pages, ensuring every page has a purpose and contributes towards your new customer acquisition.
And it’s possible because LUX Smart Pages are 100% measurable in real-time.
If any of the pages don’t drive your core KPI – we replace them with a new opportunity.
The results of buy
- Faster indexing: within weeks, almost all of LUX Smart Pages are indexed by Google
- Reach further: rank on thousands of keywords you have never tapped into (or ranked on) before
- Faster ranking: Smart Pages typically rank up to 10x faster than a landing page built in-house.
Want to know why LUX Smart Pages rank so fast? Click here to schedule a call with our team and we’ll show you precisely why.
- More organic traffic: 40% increase in non-brand to your total site from your LUX Smart Pages. This isn’t including the overall uplift you will see from the power of your LUX Smart Links.
- Increased revenue: with a LUX Smart Page, we only target non-brand keywords delivering a high percentage of new customers who would otherwise have gone to your competitors.
100% Measurable: real-time metrics such as new customer acquisition, total traffic driven, revenue, ROI and more – the class of metrics commonly seen in paid search.
Tens of thousands of multi-product landing pages in under six weeks
How long does it take for Lux Smart Pages to go live?
Say you wanted to target 50,000 keywords, the LUX Smart Pages would typically be ready to go live in under six weeks.
With Longtail UX working in its strengths – creating these landing pages on your behalf and plugging them into your system – it gives you the freedom to work in your strengths; To continue growing the brand without the drain on your internal resources.
Here’s a side-by-side comparison of buy and build:
How to know if you should build or buy?
When to build
The perfect time to build is when you’re starting out.
From the outset, you build your category landing pages and content, prioritising long tail demand over short tail demand.
But the limitations still exist:
- Do you have the budget?
- How long will one landing page take you? How long will the entire project take you?
- Can you optimise, measure and tweak every single landing page daily?
- Can you build landing pages quickly enough to reach your ROI targets?
When to buy
While it’s never out of the question for a new site to capture immediate demand, buying landing pages is typically an option used by a site that already has:
- An established brand and online presence
- Strong domain authority
- A good SEO strategy in place
- Already successful in level 0 to level 2 categories (landing pages build on top of funnel keywords, categories, main menu, sub-menus)
When you start building out your category landing pages with top-of-funnel keywords, each landing page has to come under either the main menu or sub-menu category.
Pro tip: You could try to index a search result page, but we’ve found this strategy doesn’t rank as high as when you host a landing page through your third party.
Start capturing the demand with Longtail UX
If you decide to buy your landing pages, does that mean you should cancel your SEO strategy, fire your internal development team, and shut down your Google ads?
No – continue doing everything you’re already doing; publish great content and build your category landing pages.
The Longtail UX Customer Acquisition Platform is not a replacement for your current strategies, but a accompaniment to your current tech stack.
When you witness what a LUX Smart Page looks like plugged into your site, you’ll understand why so many other major eCommerce sites around the world are leaning into Longtail UX.
If you’ve been wondering how to create high converting landing pages (at scale), dominate the SERPs, and see a solid boost in customer acquisition, click here to talk with a member of our team.
