It’s widely recognised that the value of the home page is no longer the mighty tour de force it once was. That’s because when potential customers search for your products and services, they’re more likely to find your landing pages, not your home page.
Google’s ever-evolving indexing algorithm is focused on returning web pages that are most relevant to the needs of the searcher, meaning that the pages you’ve created for your products and services – your landing pages – are usually the first entry point in the experience funnel of your website.
All this while that beautifully crafted home page – almost always the result of hours of planning, design and internal congratulation – is often not visited at all by valuable inbound search traffic.
If your business is guilty of this – putting all of its website eggs into one basket – then there’s a very real risk that your competitors are mopping up your (unimpressed) potential customers. It’s time to switch your website focus onto planning, designing, writing and optimising the pages on your website that searchers actually land on, and less focus on the home page.
It’s now more important than ever to get the messaging and marketing strategy on those landing pages as strong – if not stronger – than the traditional front door to your website. Once we come to terms with the fact that searchers are the party with power, and Google is on their side, not ours – we can strip away the egotistical layers of traditional outbound marketing, and instead focus on creating inbound-targeted landing pages that meet the needs of our customers quickly, and effectively.
What are landing pages?
Some agencies and online marketing tools define them as web pages which marketing activity is funneled towards. This is true in the case of email marketing, where – as a rudimentary example – a product launch will try to push customers towards a landing page built completely around that product.
Similarly, conducting keyword research into your target market will also throw up crucial data about what your customers are looking for, or more pertinently, what their problems are. So landing pages can also be created to answer those problems and questions directly. Examples might include a real-life scenario in which your product or service solves a genuine problem facing your search audience, as shown in the keyword research.
However, it’s also fair to say that any page on your website is a potential landing page.
A more than cursory look at your Google Analytics acquisition data will show you the pages where people are landing – so it’s worth taking a twin strategy of combining marketing campaign pages with your existing product and service pages into your thinking when it comes to planning.
One thing landing pages throughout the mix do have in common, is that they should be focused on providing information and resources in a fast and effective way, with as little fuss as possible.
Further, it should be pretty much capable of letting the user do everything they need to do – on one page – without needing to navigate anywhere else. This includes a clearly structured design – often with a neat and easy to use contact form.
What should be the aim of my landing pages?
The aim is to funnel these potential customers into contacting you – or at least leaving the page armed with the solution to the problem so they can share it with colleagues and decision makers in their organisation.
And because landing pages can be moulded to providing content and resources tailored to the needs of the searcher, the conversion rates on them can be huge in comparison to your other company-centric pages.
Monitoring your landing pages with Google Analytics, as well as keeping tabs on the number of contact form submissions – will also help you to understand how successful your strategy is, performance wise. Some pages will invariably do better than others, sometimes due to the volume of search traffic with an interest in, or problem solved by your product. However, others will be down to how well optimised, designed and written your pages are.
The key is to get the message across succinctly and effectively – with a clear call to action aimed at compelling the visitor to find out more. And when they do, you’ve hit the sweet spot – and conversions will follow.
Find out more
To find out more about how Fred can help you to plan and create killer landing pages for increased conversions, get in touch with us today!
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