SEO for Marketo Landing Pages

Today’s quick tip is SEO for Marketo Landing Pages. This is one of my pet peeves since Marketo doesn’t make it super easy to do.

While you may think many of your landing pages don’t require SEO, you should rethink this because all Marketo pages default to “index” so that Google and Bing will pick them up. That’s very good for you – you want traffic!

The bad news is, unless you are paying attention, you probably have bad SEO practices on your Marketo page. How can you fix this quickly?

 Best Practice SEO for a New Landing Page

The default system for Marketo is to copy the Page Name into the Page URL. As the image shows, when you do this with a “natural name,” Marketo makes the URL slug with caps and no spaces or dashes. It’s perfectly fine for the Marketo Page Name, since Google doesn’t see that, but this is BAD for the URL.

Instead, set a naming practice that uses dashes in the Page Name so that the URL automatically takes in the correct URL. Alternatively, just go in and replace the slug with something that puts your keywords at the front. Remember, Google and your audience can see the URL, so avoid complicated codes that don’t matter to the rest of the world.

[Update: 6/11/14: Marketo has made this the default behavior now]

Here’s what Google and your audience would see:

To learn more about URL best practices, visit Moz or KISSMetrics.

How to Build the Right Marketo Page Meta Tags

In Marketo, each page has a set of Meta tags that help search engines and the audience understand what they should click on. Getting this right is the key to SEO. In Marketo, you can help your team do this right using the following steps.

1. Landing Page Templates Should Have Default Metas

Your templates should include the following meta tags with defaults. These defaults can be My Tokens that you know will be used in a Program. They could also be standard SEO your main site uses. This is a minimum and doesn’t release you from doing the next two steps.

• Meta Title.
• Meta Description.
• Publisher Rel – learn more about this since it involves Google+.
• Author Rel – ensures blog post authors viewed. Create a default profile.
• Facebook OG tags if needed.

Remember you can tokenize the above tags. It’s up to you.

2. Program Templates Should Have My Tokens with These Values.

In Programs, you can create Program Templates with standard My Tokens. I recommend doing this even for Meta values assuming you run a lot of events or programs that you want exposed to the rest of the world. You should do this for PPC campaigns too because your SEO affects your Quality Score and thus your CTR. My tokens would look like this, using Text tokens.

• {{my.Meta Description}}
• {{my.Author Rel Link}}
• {{my.Page Title}}

Why use tokens here? They allow you to edit the metas without using the next step. Saving time and getting your SEO right are big win-wins. Of course, tokens may not solve your Metas every single time, but it’s a best practice for Events and PPC.

3. Adjust all pages manually using Edit Page Meta Tags 

When you edit a page, you can also do a few cool things, including fixing the HEAD area. First, edit page meta tags:

Then you can modify what Google sees and displays to the rest of the world. Note you can use Tokens here, including in the LP Template itself.

If you did this right, Google will display the Title, URL, and Description in the SERPs. If you also added Publisher and Author Rel tags to Custom HEAD HTML, your picture will appear.

Remember to do these steps to ensure you maximize your Organic traffic on any campaign.

And remember to sign up for more help from Marketing Rockstar Guides. And stay tuned for a big announcement about the Marketo Guide.