LANDING PAGES
Landing pages are a big piece of the internet marketing puzzle and a big part of being successful in your internet marketing agenda. The other important elements that are critical to your success of any online marketing campaign are traffic (the number of people that visit your site) and conversions (the number of people that take action when they get to your site).
Traditional Website Design
When most businesses start building a website, they automatically go with the standard layout in regards to what pages are a ‘must have’ and how the ‘site map’ is constructed. This typically includes the home page, about us page, product pages and contact us pages. This type of website is still useful in any online strategy, but it should only make up one part of an overall web design strategy.
Driving Traffic
There are two primary ways of driving traffic to a website, organically (non-paid) and paid services. Search engine optimization is the process of increasing the organic rank of your page. Pay Per click is the most common process (one of many) of paying for searches to your page. Notice that in both instances, the searches are directed to a web page, not to your website.
Landing Page
Landing pages are just that, a page that based on a specific search is the page that the visitor lands on. A landing page can be a page in your site (not the home page) or a dedicated page hosted independently of your site.
Let’s say you’re an online garden store that sells a range of different products, including shovels, grass seed, flowers, or wheel barrows… and you have a website where people can buy them from. You pay for targeted keywords, such as ‘buy grass seed’ and ‘buy yard tools’ and send all the traffic to the home page of your website.
If the person that typed in ‘buy grass seed’ doesn’t see a grass seed on the first page they are redirected to after they click on the ad, there is a much lower chance that they will convert to a sale. If, on the other hand, they click on the ad and are then taken to a page where they buy yard tools, there will be a much higher chance of them buying the shovel… leading to higher conversions and lower cost per customer acquisition.
All About Conversion
This is where landing pages can be very effective. Different than a home page, a landing page is a single page dedicated to a single product or service, providing the visitor everything they need to know to make a decision to buy the product immediately.
An example of a landing page can be found HERE. Here is a site where the only action the business wants the visitor to take is to purchase the product. When targeted keywords direct traffic to targeted landing pages higher conversions will occur because the visitor is seeing exactly what they are searching for in Google.
For example, if the garden store had a landing page for a rake and they bid on the keyword ‘buy rake’ in Google and Yahoo, the person who clicked on the Pay per Click ad would see exactly what they were looking for and more people would buy as a result. For many businesses, having landing pages for each of the main products is essential for maximizing advertising budgets and sales. And when landing pages are coupled with testing and tracking, maximum profits are achieved.
