Use Landing Pages to Improve Your Site’s Effectiveness

Landing pages give your site the ability to meet a visitor who has a specific interest with a page tailored exactly to that visitor’s interest. This is a great way to move a visitor closer to becoming a customer. Landing pages can help the performance of paid search and organic search campaigns.

What’s a Landing Page?

A landing page is not part of the site navigation that you see on every page. If you enter the site from the home page, it’s not easy to find the landing pages–because they are not intended for the general visitor. Landing pages look like other pages on the site, but they are linked to only by the site map that lists all the pages of the site.

Landing pages are designed for two purposes: to provide a tailored welcome for a visitor who has used a certain search term, and to get good position in search engine results for that search term.

Each landing page is written around a narrow topic that’s of concern for your site. If your site sells athletic shoes, for example, you might be interested in increasing the business you do for ranking on Air Jordan shoes from Nike. The landing page has three elements:

The title: use the term itself. In the example, it would be Air Jordan by Nike
Understanding the need: Describe the need that brings the prospect to the site, in one or two paragraphs. In the case of shoes, the need is simple, so one paragraph does the job. In the case of a medical problem the statement of need would show an understanding of the problem and how uncomfortable it is. In the example, something like “You want to have great-looking shoes that you know will help your performance on the court. You want to have shoes that come from the greatest name in basketball. And you want shoes from the leading athletic shoe manufacturer.”
Fulfilling the need: Now take a couple of paragraphs to describe how the product meets the need. For the example, you could talk about the appearance of the shoe in detail, all its parts and how they work together to provide top performance and how Michael Jordan personally tests and endorses them and wears them to play. Be sure to completely cover the needs you’ve described in Step 2.
Call to action: Here you tell the reader just what to do in order to fulfill that need. What do you want them to do? You might even have two possible actions–“Call and make an appointment and sign up for the newsletter to keep abreast of what we’re doing, for example. Or “Come to your local Shoe World shop to try out the latest Air Jordans on a real basketball court, and leave your email address so that we can tell you about special deals.” Mke it easy to do what you want–provide a “contact us” button and a “newsletter” button. And make sure that a “contact us” has a “subscribe to our newsletter” box that’s already checked when it’s opened.

In order to help get good search engine position for the key term, be sure to use it to start the title meta tag and use it in the description meta tag. Use it as the first and last words of the text on the page, and use it six additional times in the discussion.

For paid search, use the URL of this page instead of your home page as the destination URL in AdWords and any other paid search providers you use for this term.

To identify which terms to use for landing pages, analyzing the site log will tell you which terms bring visitors who read the highest number of pages. Target those people.