Your landing page is the first interaction that visitors to your website have with your brand, product or company. A landing page is the web page you’re brought to when you click on an organic or paid listing in the search results. Because it is a high-traffic landing page, most people consider their home page to be the most important page on their site, but it isn’t the only page that serves this purpose. In fact, just about every page on your site serves as a landing page, so you should optimize these pages as if they were landing pages for an AdWords campaign.
Each page of your site that loads quickly, is free of technical SEO errors, has fresh and unique content, as well as relevant keywords, has the potential to be one of your ranked landing pages. As Googlebot crawls your site and indexes new pages, there is an opportunity for any page on your site to show up in search engine result pages (SERPs).
Now you know what a landing page is, but what is the purpose of a landing page?
The Goal of a Landing Page
Landing pages should be viewed as yet another tool in your online marketing toolbox. As such, your landing pages need to have a purpose in order to help your business acquire new leads and climb higher on SERPs. Before you begin designing (or redesigning) your landing page(s), sit down and establish clear goals for the features and intent of your page. If the thought of designing landing pages for your upcoming product launch or Back to School Sale makes your head spin, contact a professional marketing agency. The cost of having a landing page built for your company’s next marketing campaign will be minimal compared to value you will see from that campaign.
Whether you set a goal of increasing the number of conversions or the number of people who navigate beyond your landing page, you need to have a goal, track it, and compare those figures over time.
Main Types of Landing Pages
Most marketing agencies recognize two types of landing pages: reference and transactional. A reference landing page is one that focuses on providing information that potential clients find useful. As an example, your company may design a reference landing page that offers a summary of the products you sell.
Transactional landing pages, on the other hand, are used to encourage viewers on your site to engage your brand by asking them to provide contact information and/or purchase a product or service that is advertised online. One of the tactics used to jumpstart this interaction includes withholding information. Visitors are told they can gain more information once contact information (name, phone number, and/or email) has been provided.
The latter type of landing page is a great tool for marketers looking to increase conversion numbers and build a solid database of client contacts that can be used in a direct marketing program.
Create a Clear Call to Action (CTA)
Now that you know what a landing page is, what types of landing pages exist, and how to use them, it’s time to determine what’s needed for your landing page to be effective. Whether you’re constructing a reference or transactional landing page, you need to start with a clear call to action, or CTA, to display on that page. Many marketers and webmasters (us included!) believe that a solid CTA is the most important part of any landing page.
A CTA must be tied to your goal, and it should be supported by all the other content on your landing page. The headline, body copy, images, videos, and overall layout of the page should serve the purpose of supporting your goal. For example, if your goal is to build a database of client contacts, you need to make it easy for visitors to provide contact information and allow them swift access to the data they’re searching for on your site.
Encourage visitors to leave a name and email address to subscribe to your newsletter, and immediately transfer them to the destination page they are looking for on your site. Images should inform them of what they can access after providing basic information. Likewise, the body content should quickly and concisely extoll the benefits of signing up and providing contact info to your company.
Keep it Simple
Everything about your landing page should be simple. The more complex your landing page becomes, the more diluted your message is as a result. While the other pages on your site can show off your creativity and include deep information that helps visitors make a decision between products or services you offer, your landing page should be the exact opposite. You also want to keep your landing page as simple as possible to ensure it loads quickly. The main reason your users are bouncing from your landing pages or website are your slow load times. What is slow? This question has been the topic of many great articles and will be a future article of mine.
You have as little as 8 seconds to catch your visitors’ attention and get them to engage with your brand when they hit your landing page. Extraneous or deep information is distracting, and when your landing page is not short and concise, it pulls visitors away from conversions or results in their departure.
Interactions on a landing page need to be short and sweet as well. You want your visitors to provide information that can be used later on for direct marketing campaigns, but visitors don’t want to spend several minutes filling out a form requiring name, number, mailing address, email address, product interest, career, and more. Keep your forms simple and ask for just a name and email or phone number. Let them provide their information in a few seconds and get on with their visit to your site.
Last but not least, mind the fold. If visitors have to scroll on your landing page to find information, odds are they will depart your site before interacting. Keep the content short and make sure everything can show up on one screen without the need to scroll.
Test, Test, Test
In the end, you should never stop testing the design, CTA, and effectiveness of your landing page. What works today might not work in a few months. By the same token, the approach you take to a reference landing page may not work as well on a transactional landing page. Trial and error will eventually direct you to the design of a landing page that works best for your particular situation and goal. Without continued testing, you may never find the optimal landing page that powers your brand toward greater visibility.
Need help creating the perfect landing page for your next marketing campaign? Contact us now to see how we can help!
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