One of the most important but often overlooked parts of any SEO campaign is landing page optimization. This is the process of making sure that your landing pages – i.e. your home page and other key pages on your site – are designed for SEO success as well as to convert visitors to customers. You can see why this is so important – after all, what is the point of getting customers to your home page if they are going to leave your site before they buy anything?

Even though it’s apparent that increasing your landing page conversion rate is critical to the success of your site, not everyone knows how to do this. To help you out, we’ve compiled five easy steps to help turn curious site visitors into happy customers:

Customer Validation: Potential customers want to see that people just like them have had positive experiences with your products or services. You can let your past sales work for you by aggressively seeking testimonials from your customers and posting them prominently on your website.

Make Customers Feel They Are Missing Out: The “herd mentality” is a real thing when it comes to online marketing. Customers are more likely to purchase your product if they feel like other people are doing the same thing. Call if safety in numbers or not wanting to miss out on the next big thing. You can play to this by showing how many people have recently purchased or tried out your product or offering.

Customize Your Pitch: Customers want to feel like they are special and not just one of the many people receiving a sales pitch. There are many ways that you can customize your sales pitch to reach out to customers on an individual basis. You can use software to insert a person’s name or hometown, or send a different pitch to male or female customers.

Keep Access Limited:  What’s the best way to get people curious about something? Keep it hidden from them. You can do this with your online content as a way to get customers interested in what you are offering. Give them a little taste of some interesting content but ask them to send their email address to you in order to read the rest.

Speed Matters: Don’t overlook the speed of your website. If your website is slow to load, potential customers might give up and go to a different site.

Why has local business marketing become such a driving force in search engine optimization? One of the big reasons is the rise of smartphones and tablets. People no longer have to print out information about a business or look things up in a phone book. Addresses, phone numbers, website and customer reviews are all available in a convenient, handheld format. When you include the rise of Twitter and Facebook and the resulting wave of social media marketing, it’s easy to see why local SEO is so critical to a site’s success.

If you have a local business and are looking to increase your visibility, local search engine marketing is one great way to do it. Several companies offer local search engine marketing and can handle every aspect, from getting your business listed with the appropriate local online directories to building your website. However, you can also do many the steps yourself. Here are a few things you should definitely consider doing immediately if you are doing your own local search engine marketing:

Perform basic SEO: Simply put, you can’t have local SEO unless you have your traditional SEO house in order. This means having a well-constructed, informative website with plenty of useful content and intelligently linked keywords. You’ll want to strengthen this with other SEO practices such as purchasing in-bound links.

Create and update your business listings: As a small business, you need to make sure that your company is listed with all of the standard business listing sites. One of the first steps in this is to make sure that you have a Dun & Bradstreet number. Another step is to update your contact information with InfoUSA. Once you have done this, the information will gradually start feeding to places like the Yellow Pages and other online business directories.

Claim your online presence: This means going out to sites like Google+, Bing, Yahoo and Yelp and taking control of your company’s pages. You’ll want to make sure that the name, address and phone number are consistent and match what is on your website. Add photos and descriptions and encourage your customers to add positive reviews.

SEO has changed the way that we look at online marketing. It’s led to companies getting smarter about how they develop their online marketing strategy and how they can incorporate many tactics to improve their search engine ranking. However, some people seem to think that SEO is a quick fix that eliminates the need for traditional online marketing.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. While SEO is a powerful tool, it should only be one part of an integrated online marketing game plan. In fact, misunderstanding the role of SEO has led some people to develop warped ideas about online marketing. Here are four of the most common misconceptions about online marketing that people have developed thanks to SEO:

You aren’t in a battle against Google. It’s easy to think that Google has something against you personally if you are struggling to take your search engine placement to the first page. Much of this comes from the fact that there is an air of mystery behind Google’s algorithms used in search engine rankings. Because of this, many online marketers wildly vary their campaigns to reflect what they think are Google’s latest changes. This is almost always just guesswork. Instead, companies should focus on making the core SEO values that don’t change such as quality content and not focus all of their efforts on pleasing Google.

You need to invest time – and money – into any successful SEO campaign. Search engine optimization is a great way to maximize your marketing budget and see instant results. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s “free” marketing. You still need to invest resources into an SEO campaign. This can including spending money on a link building campaign or time in researching keywords and developing appropriate content.

You won’t make money without offering something of value. While it’s true that you can get a site to the top of Google search pages simply by buying links, spun content and a low-quality website, will this make you money? Eventually, people are going to see the quality (or lack) of your offerings. It’s always better to base your success on high quality content and products.

Real world testing is better than solely relying on expert advice. It’s never a bad idea to do research and read articles from experts explaining things that have worked for them. But there’s no substitute for doing your own research and learning through trial and error.

Using SEO tactics to get customers to your website is great. After all, people need to find your site in order to use it. Companies know this – it’s why many spend significant amounts of time and resources on professional search engine marketing. However, getting people to visit your site is only part of the battle. If the content is weak or poorly written, or the layout is distracting and confusing, what is the point?

It’s easy for a web development consultant to spend so too much time worrying about SEO considerations and not enough thinking about customer usability; this often leads to websites that rank highly with search engines but have low conversion rates when it comes to translating web views into actual sales.

Don’t fall victim to this short-sighted approach to web development services. Instead, utilize these five tricks that will help boost your search engine rankings while also improving the interface and user experience for your customers:

Know Your Customer: There’s no such thing as the “typical” customer. But by doing some market research. you can understand what drives a potential customer in your category to make a purchasing decision. Remember that a website that works for one type of business might not be appropriate for another business.

Make Your Content Have a Point: The content on your website isn’t just there to fill space or serve as filler between optimized keywords. Think about the types of questions that you customers might have and design your text to clearly answer these questions.

Keep Graphics Simple and Clean: It’s easy to try and go overboard with graphics, colors and other design elements with laying out your website. After all, you want your site to be memorable and eye-catching. But in many cases, this means that your website will also be distracting and keep people from finding the links and information they need to make a purchasing decision.

Make Navigation Easy to Follow: One of the main reasons that people leave a website before making a purchase is because of poorly development site navigation. If they can’t easily find a link to the information they need, they’ll likely leave and try out a competitors’ site. Check your website design and make sure that customers can quickly get to the pages that lead to sales.

Track and Change: The work isn’t done when your website goes live. You need to track visitors, clickthrough rates and sales to determine what does and doesn’t work and make changes quickly if necessary.