Some people are reluctant to make any changes to a landing page when it has already proven to be at least moderately successful. If your landing page is directing visitors to a page where they can submit a contact form and become a new lead, it is probably doing its job fairly well. It’s usually when you’re not getting the volume of customer leads that you need, that it becomes time to make some changes on your landing page. But when you do make landing page changes, can it actually hurt your SEO standing? You’ll find some of the answers to that at this site, and we’ll include some answers in the content below as well. However, the short answer to the question is that some changes you make can improve your SEO standing, while others can actually lower your SEO rating, and cause you to lose traffic.

Changes that might improve your SEO

When you replace the content on your website with newer or longer content, it will generally improve your SEO. Examples of this are when you provide a more in- depth article or blog which has been lengthened by adding graphics, tables, and other visual aids. Images and videos are both highly ranked by Google and the other search engines, so if part of your improvement is to add more images and video, you will almost certainly see a rise in your SEO rating, which would then result in more traffic to your website.

Also keep in mind that improving your content by adding images and video will generally result in a favorable impact on SEO, and probably at least a few more leads every month for you. Having replaced at least some of your content, you may also need to modify your title and heading tags. If you do a good job with this, it's possible that you might also improve your SEO rankings and garner more business as well.

However, it’s also possible to replace your title and heading tags with headings that are deemed irrelevant and less useful by the search engines. In this case, you may end up losing ground on your SEO and having a lower ranking. The trick is to make those heading tags at least as good as they were before in describing the content of paragraphs, and to keep them on point with whatever your new content is.

Changes that might hurt your SEO

When you make wholesale changes to the content on your landing page, it's very possible that you could end up hurting your SEO. That's why it's never really a good idea to replace functional and highly ranking content with a complete rewrite. It's better to make more incremental changes that may improve your ranking, but certainly don't do any damage to it in the meantime.

By changing your title, topic headings, subject matter, and the whole theme of your content, it's entirely possible that you'll not only have lower readership, but you could cause previously loyal followers to abandon your site entirely. If possible, test the new content elsewhere before plugging it into your landing page and having it impact your hard-earned SEO.

Another case where it's usually not a good idea to make wholesale changes to your landing page is when you have relatively new content, and possibly even some keywords that are beginning to rank highly. It generally takes months for the content of any landing page to be seen by a high volume of readers, so if you interrupt the ongoing success of your landing page by replacing content early on, you may end up doing much more damage than good.

After you install new content on a landing page, it’s best to wait several months to see how it plays out in the rankings before making any changes. If it turns out that you're not attracting the volume of traffic that you had in mind, that would be the time to make changes and try to tweak the content of your landing page.

Should you change your landing page?

As you can see from the above, there are situations when it might be advisable to change the content of your landing page, just as there are situations where the content should be left alone. If you take care to regularly audit your content, and you are using data analytics to determine the usage of your website, as well as the number of visitors, leads, and conversions you get, you should have a good understanding of how effective the landing page really is.

The tricky part will come when your landing page is actually performing fairly well – but you are forced to make some kinds of changes to it anyway. In a case like this, any changes should be kept to a minimum, and you should probably only include the absolutely necessary changes. That way, you can still ride off the success of your original landing page, but you can also blend in needed changes subtly and with little impact.

Change is usually a good thing on websites, and if you manage that change correctly, it can work in your favor. It’s something that you’ll have to acquire a skill for, especially if you anticipate regular changes to your landing site. With a little practice, you should be able to incorporate any necessary changes to content without disrupting your SEO ranking.

Sources
1. https://www.prdistribution.com/blog/will-replacing-content-on-a-landing-page-hurt-seo/