Cup of SEO

Why?  Because there are often no links on the site itself or any other site on the internet linking to these landing pages.

Now, there are landing pages built for search engines as well, you primarily see this happen with local search terms.  A company will make identical landing pages for each state, city, or zip code with the same information otherwise.  The effectiveness of this has decreased quite a bit with the introduction of universal search, with the blended results from local business listings often providing more accurate results.

So tonight as I was going through a clients site and checking which pages were indexed, I noticed all of the landing pages for his campaign are not indexed, and they could provide him with some additional traffic.  These specific pages are targeted towards specific services rather than locations as I discussed above.

Here are a few examples:

Basement Projects

Custom Homes

Decks and Porch Builder

Kitchen Projects

Landscaping, Patios, & Walkways

Outdoor Kitchens

Swimming Pools

You will notice that all the pages are very similar in nature.  The thing is, these pages do not add much overall value of to a search, you would be better off concentrating on building links to your primary service pages for each of your services, rather than worrying about these landing pages, in my opinion.  With that said, every page in the search engines index can help your site in some way.

Of course a sitemap can help the search engines find your landing pages if you choose to include them, or you can link to them from within your site, but I don’t see the latter taking place very often, and I have never seen it pulled off in a clean way.  That is, the users often find no value in these pages once they enter the site, so why include it in the site design at all?  It’s pointless, except for the link that would help the search engines find the page.

I’ll leave it to you how to use this information, I am sure making sure your PPC landing pages are indexed could have some benefits, but for some sites the extra effort and time involved may not pay off in the end.