Landing pages get mentioned a lot in internet marketing. Some people think they’re the be all and end all of internet marketing.

But, unless you’ve taken steps to exclude robots, every page of your site is a landing page…

Google doesn’t treat your specially designed landing pages any different to any other page on your site.

It crawls it – unless the page has been excluded via a no index command – and figures out what it’s about, based on the content of the page and the hints it gets from other pages and sites that link to the page.

Exactly the same as it does for any page on your website.

Likewise, it doesn’t point people to the main (index) page of your site unless that specifically matches what they typed in.

So if you have a business page and someone searches for your business by name, the index page will probably show up.

But as soon as they add words to their search, Google’s computer will decide whether a different page might better suit their needs.

So if they type in your business name and your town or district, there’s a chance the “how to find us” page will rank better.

The same logic goes for any site.

Your main, index, page can’t hope to be the best one for searchers.

So even if you’ve turned it into a “landing page”, as soon as you add extra pages they also become potential landing pages.

Because any page that shows on the search results is a potential landing page for that search.

Think about that sentence for a minute.

With the possible exception of your privacy page and your terms and conditions page, every single page on your website has the chance of appearing in the search results for some phrases.

Not always the phrase you first thought of or were targeting, either.

Once people start typing in more than a handful of words in their search, the competition for that phrase drops to almost zero.

Try it.

Search for a phrase that’s maybe 5 or 6 words long (just choose it from the suggestions that come up if you don’t want to type that much) and see how many times that entire phrase is bolded on the first page of the search results.

Once? Twice?

Or more likely, zero.

Which means it could be one of your pages that shows up in the results, even if that wasn’t what you originally intended.

It happens all the time.

And it means that you need to treat each and every page you create on your site as if it’s a landing page.

Because it could be.

The easiest way is to do that when you create the page – it’s a lot easier when you do that rather than go back over tens or hundreds of pages and attempt to improve them.

The two main things you need to check are:

• The page title
• The meta description

That’s it for an existing page on your site – you’ve already created the content.

If you’re using WordPress and have an SEO plugin like Yoast’s then you can even get a preview of what it will look like in the search results.

Here’s what Yoast thinks this page will look like in the results if it showed up for the phrase landing page:

It’s nice to see that and if your WordPress SEO plugin doesn’t show that, I’d suggest you change to one that does. It just makes visualising things so much easier.

If you’ve got lots of existing pages on your site, start by amending the ones that get most views.

And make a promise to yourself that you’ll treat every new page you create as being a potential landing page.

If you’d like more help, check out my Content Creation Crash Course.

And feel free to add your thoughts below.