Landing Pages for Your Search Engine Marketing

“Once searchers arrive on your landing pages, you have 0-8 seconds to convince visitors that they are on the right site.”
Gordon Hotchkiss. President, Enquiro

What is a Landing Page?

A Landing page is where visitors land after clicking on an email link, a search engine result, a banner ad, or manually type in a specific advertised address.
Although the website’s home page can also be referred to as a “Landing Page” with this definition, it is custom to refer to an internal page as a real landing page. A landing page can also exist on a special domain name used for marketing promotions.  These pages are focused on a particular product, service or item rather than a typical homepage with lots of choices for the user.

A landing page is not vastly different from a corporate website. However it is a specialized page that visitors are directed to once they've clicked on a link (from an Email Marketing newsletter for example), an offer, a banner ad, a search result on Google search results page, a PPC ad or any other generic URL that they have heard of in a TV commercial, radio ad, etc’. The page is usually tightly focused on a particular product or service with the aim of getting the visitor to buy or take some form of action rapidly that will lead ultimately to a sale.

A successful landing page must answer the following key questions:

What is the offer?
Who is the target audience?
Why are they interested, and why should they take further action?
How do they get started?

Landing Pages: Why are they important?

Fact:  79% of internet traffic goes to internal pages (i.e. landing page) on a website - leaving only 21% of visitors finding your homepage first. Source:  Marketing Sherpa

Landing pages simplify the clutter in front of users and clarify the task you would like them to complete.  By offering simple features and targeted information users can clearly see what to do next - thus increasing the chances they will do so.

In other words – if you thought that the home page of your website is the most important page, you should reconsider that. With the progress of the search engines search algorithm, the SEO tactics being used and the intensive usage of Search Engine Advertising techniques such as Google Adwords, it is your site’s internal pages that appearing high on the search engines results pages. As such, most of the traffic to your website is actually getting to your internal pages rather than your website’s home page, and this is a good thing.

Landing Pages and Search Engine Marketing

The goal of a landing page is to increase the amount of users taking action on your site.  The internet world refers to this as increasing "conversions".  Simply increasing your website conversion rate from 1% to 2% doubles your return on investment.  What if you increased your conversion rate from 1% to 10%?
 
Data collected online shows that the average conversion rates for lead generation for the home page from search engine marketing fall between 5 percent to 6 percent.

Landing pages that match the theme of the keyword search have an average conversion closer to 10%.

Landing pages that match the keyword exactly have a conversion rate closer to 12%!

Whether you are paying for clicks or not, you should think about these conversion rates.
Bluntly put, you should assume that most people visiting your site via PPC suffer from "Attention Deficiency Disorder". They're rushing through their day with the usual thousands of distractions, trying to accomplish a task quickly: buy what your site is offering.

They do a Google search. They click on your ad. They start at the top left corner of the page and try to decide whether the page (and by extension, the site) matches their need/desire. If it does, they continue scanning the page, and possibly convert. If not, they're gone -- possibly forever.

How long does this process take? You'll read various estimates. Some even estimate that it is as short as less than one second. But you can find out yourself: use your web analytics  to find out the bounce rate for your current landing page, and the duration of the visit for those who bounced off the page.

Landing pages are important for your SEM efforts also because “Google said so”: Google introduced a web crawler for Google Adwords, AdBot-Google, which checks to see if your keywords and landing pages are relevant to each other. That information is used to determine your ad quality score. Ads with a high quality score can rank higher, even if the ad buyer is paying less than others for the ad. Google has also indicated that refusal to allow AdBot scanning could result in lower scores.


A good landing page helps sell; it’s the first step in the process of convincing the visitor to your site to buy from you. Thus, when you point a PPC ad to your site, you don’t, in most cases, want to simply point to your home page. If you sell 100 products, and your ad is pushing a particular product, pointing to your home page is going to lose a lot of people.

Landing Page Optimization

A landing page helps convert online traffic. As it plays such an important factor for you, wouldn’t you want to optimize it to bring the best possible results? Of course you do.
Landing pages optimization is a process of improving landing pages by using best practices, the latest researches and knowledge available in that field and experience built with years and customers.

The design element is an important consideration when creating landing pages as it can hugely impact the overall acceptance and decision making process. However, it is not the only element. Landing page optimization and testing (see hereafter) is a complex activity that requires knowledge of many fields, including usability, copywriting, Web design and more. But at its core, we're still trying to influence the behavior of people.
 
As a matter of fact, Landing Pages optimization is nowadays an expertise on its own that takes into account multiple factors that may (or might) impact the effectiveness of your landing page and with that – the effectiveness of you marketing efforts online.

The optimization process will start with an analysis of the goals and the marketing strategies being employed. Following that step, data is collected using Web Analytics, to become aware of how site visitors respond to a particular call to action. Varied responses and data about visitor behavior are collected in a systematic manner. Based on detailed analysis of this data, you are getting recommendations and implementation of enhancements to your landing pages to further enhance the visitor experience and convert more targeted traffic.



Allow WSI E-Services to conduct a complimentary review of your existing landing pages and come up with the plan to optimize them. You are invited to contact us today.

Landing Page Testing

Engaging in a Landing Pages Testing program should result in continuous optimization of your landing pages and by that – continuous optimization of your goals. This is directly connected to the success of your SEO, PPC or any other Search Engine Marketing tactics you are employing. Using A/B or Multivariate Testing programs you will be able to increase your conversions and make the most out of your marketing strategy.

With our strong belief in sharing our knowledge to promote more effective and responsible Internet marketing, we make it our duty to keep abreast of leading-edge technologies and techniques that drive profitable traffic to our clients. In today's fast changing market space we truly believe that since “the Internet is the Marketing Engine of the 21st Century”, landing pages have become one of the most popular and effective testing grounds for seasoned marketers to gauge the result of targeted offers.

Landing pages testing enabling you to refine message and offer based on where the ad is being placed, understand what works and what doesn’t work and maximize conversion rates. Testing creates greater opportunity to optimize the page, which will again maximize conversion rates and decrease marketing spend.

Contact WSI E-Services to learn more on Landing Page testing programs for your company.

6 Steps of Landing Page Construction process

Goals & Success Definition: which purpose the landing page serves? To which type of campaign it is connect? Those are just 2 of the very important questions that are being analyzed at this step in the process. The answer to those carries immense important to any step that will follow.
Customer Profiling: Your landing pages are not about you; they are about your potential customer. As such, we need to create an ideal customer profile. It may be that there are multiple profiles ( where in such a case the will have to be prioritized), but it is highly important to try and avoid appealing to a too broad of an audience as you will risk targeting no one.
URL Selection: Some of the time, the landing page is best to be created in a URL of its own, disconnected from the corporate company’s site. There are multiple reasons for doing so, such as ease of recollection and use of the main keyword in the URL for better connection with the campaign that is driving the visitors to the landing page.
Wireframing: this where are the page elements are being “wired” together. Elements like the sized, fonts, calls to action, above and below the fold, the structure of the form are being designed at this point.
Copywriting: one of the major aspects of landing pages implementation, which is why it deserves its own step. 3 main elements to consider: the headlines, the call to action and the body copy (which although only 20% of the visitors will actually read, it still should be good and properly designed for conversion).
Testing & Tweaking: Here is where a schedule for gathering and analyzing the different metrics takes place. You are running a constant review of the initial goals and look at the results. Testing of the landing page is crucial as of this phase, since you can witness improvements of hundreds of percentages in your conversion ratio.

To have us implementing a landing page strategy for you, create the type of landing pages that convert shoppers into buyers and enhance your online marketing as well as your search engine marketing initiatives, contact us today.