Content strategy for landing pages: Topics vs Features

[vtmoz]

Hi all,

We are going to create new landing pages and optimise existing pages. We have a confusion on how to employ content on these pages....whether these will be filled with content to rank for "topics" and "keywords" or direclty jump into the features are are providing. If we go with first, users may feel boring about teaching them about that topic, if we go with latter...it's hard to rank being no related content to rank for that topic. I have seen some of the websites are employing multiple landing pages where they fill with topic related content and then link to features pages. I need suggestions here.

Thank you

[KaneJamison]

I would think of these as keyword first, and use the general topic to inform what should go on that page. You'll also need to separate the purpose of the page versus the intent of the keyword.

For example, let's say you sell payroll software. A few of the keywords you'll encounter might include:

• payroll
• payroll services
• payroll software
• free payroll calculator
• how to do payroll

Each of these keywords has a different intent - so I would start out by identifying what the user should likely find if you were magically ranking #1 for that content:

• payroll - this is a "split intent" keyword and the user could be looking for a number of things. Let's set this aside for a moment, but most likely only your highest linked pages will rank for a head term like this, so your goal is to either get your homepage ranking, or get your "payroll guide" type of content ranking.
• payroll services - this is going to be a features/services type of page or even a homepage, since the user is looking for someone to take over their payroll. As a software company, you may want to build this page and tell users how your team handles payroll (if they do) or how the user doesn't need to hire a full service because your software makes it so easy.
• payroll software - this user likely wants to do their own payroll but automate the process with software, maybe even making it a one-step process. That deserves a feature/product type of page experience selling them on what your software offers.
• free payroll calculator - this user is most likely already handling their own payroll and just wants to use a quick tool to spot check their numbers. You should built a tool that does this for the user, and then have a call to action on the page that says you can save them a lot of time by just using your software instead.
• how to do payroll - this user is early on in the process of hiring employees or managing payroll and wants a complete guide to make sure they're doing it right. This type of query deserves a long-form guide, similar to the Beginner's Guide to SEO.

On each of these pages it might be natural to talk about taxes, W2s, benefits, deductions, etc. But you're going to talk about them different on each of these pages. Yes - you will want some body content on every page you publish that is intended to rank for something, but you can talk about the topics differently on every page.

Does this process help you in figuring out what type of content to put on each page? I can keep going but want to make sure that this is helping.