akmg

There's a popular topic of debate asking which is more successful, SEO landing pages or SEM landing pages.

Let me end the discussion right here: neither.

For those of you who think I'm crazy, give me one more line.

Neither is successful alone because you can't have one without the other.

That is, of course, assuming you want to have a successful site. If you don't, feel free to skip one or the other. Personally, I like the money, so I'll use them both.

With the obvious stuff out of the way, let's get into why there's confusion on this subject. What exactly is the difference? Why do people strongly contest the difference between these two landing pages?

In SEM, the emphasis is on getting traffic to your site by spending money. In SEO, the emphasis is on getting traffic to your site via organic, natural placement. However, herein lays the heart of the problem. People over think the methodology utilized to get people to their sites.

You can ignore the method people took to get to your site. Why is that? No matter how people got to your site, a text ad, a banner, natural placement, paid links, etc. the goal once they're there is the same: you want them to take action.

When they take action, it's going to happen where? Landing pages.

Consequently, this becomes more of a discussion on proper landing page design, layout and utilization of multivariate testing, which is a completely different discussion.

Once you have fully tweaked, tested and created an amazing landing page, why wouldn't you hedge your bets on both SEM and SEO? The added volume of users to your site from SEM will help you stand out in search engine's eyes due to the traffic. It will also help increase your chances of getting inbound links to your page and/or site and it will increase your organic placement.

So get out there, make some amazing landing pages, throw in some cash for SEM, optimize the page for SEO, and work with the understanding that you have great landing pages, get ready to watch users take action on your site!