Written by “You should really spend some effort optimising your landing page.”
“You can increase your conversions just by putting some work into your landing pages.”
“Good landing pages can really improve your visitors experience!”
All good sounding stuff! But, what exactly is a landing page? And how does it accomplish these wonderful things?
So, landing pages?
A landing page, put simply, is the page that a visitor first arrives at on your website.
A common misconception is that every visitor to your site arrives to your front page first and navigates through your site from there.
While your front page probably, or rather, usually is the most common “landing page” it is not the only one.
PPC Landing Pages
If you are using PPC (pay per click) services, like Google Adwords for instance, your landing page can affect a couple of important factors :
1. Your cost per click; When Google analyses your Ad, it compares your selected (targeted) keywords with the content on the page you are linking that particular ad to.
So for instance, you set up a new ad campaign for “Cheap Books” Your ad title and text reflect this keyword and you select your targeted keywords around this term. But then you link it to a page on your site that sells “cheap magazines”!
The relevancy of your ad is going to be very low, when your relevancy is low, your cost per click goes up.
So selecting an appropriate “landing page” for your ad is not to be underestimated.
2. Conversion rate; Your conversion rate is basically how many of your visitors translate into sales / signups / contact. If your users are arriving to a badly designed page, difficult to navigate page or a difficult to understand page your chance of converting these visitors is going to be quite low.
Spending time designing and optimising a page for conversion for a particular visitor is a good use of time.
Organic Search Result Landing Pages
“So, if I’m not using Adwords, landing page optimisation isn’t something I need to look into?”
When a search is done on Google, Google prides itself on returning the most relevant results. Generally this won’t be the front page of a site.
If you do a search in Google for “car hire in Geneva” all the sites in the top 10 (apart from position one which is a site called “carhiregeneva”) are landing pages other than the front page. This is because while the front pages of these sites deal with car hire, they don’t deal specifically with car hire in Geneva, they have a sub page set up to deal with that keyword.
“So how do I implement this on my site?”
A Landing Page Strategy
A good strategy for creating landing pages for your site is to first of all generate a selection of keywords that are covered by your service / shop etc.
Group these terms into sections based on subject.
Create landing pages that cover these terms specifically, this should be reflected in the page name, title, description, headings, alt texts and content.
After placing a link to this page from your front page or site navigation with the keyword in the link text your landing page setup is complete.
This is just the beginning however as by testing the layout of the page you can increase the conversions even further.
Landing Page Results
The more landing pages you have, the more keywords your website is covering and the more exposure your site is getting on the search engines. All of this equals more visitors. More convesions. And ultimately more business!
