Landing Pages
When you talk about search engine optimization (SEO) or Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising the term "landing pages" comes up quite a bit. So what exactly is a landing page? Technically, it is any page on your site that a visitor arrives at after clicking through on a link.
However, landing pages normally are targeted by the site owner as a place where you want your traffic to be sent in the hopes of either earning a purchase or capturing the visitor's information. Here are a few examples:
- PPC ads - The traffic you are buying is sent to a specific landing page depending on the keywords the user searched for.
- SEO - you are targeting your landing pages with your link building campaigns using the specific anchor text you want the page to rank for.
- Email Blasts - You send newsletters to your email list driving them to landing pages that are designed to encourage purchases.
- Organization - A landing page can be used on your site as a navigation tool to organize specific posts around a central topic.
If a user clicks through to your site then you have their attention, but only for a short period of time. Your landing page then needs to get them interested quickly in what you have to offer, build a desire in that offer, and then get the visitor to take your desired action.
The best way to use landing pages is to tailor them specifically to the visitor's desire. You need to know what the searchers issue, problem, or question is and why there are searching for it at this time. What do they expect to find when they click through to your page? You need to show them how you can provide the answer or solution. A quality landing page is very targeted and tailored to what the visitor wanted to find.
Homepages are not good for this. Only small niche sites are targeted enough to have a homepage tailored to specific requests. Generally your index page should be built to allow visitors to easily navigate to different sections of your site and will appeal to a more general audience.
Your landing page copy should drive the user to a specific action. Ask yourself "what do you want them to do?" This can mean a purchase but it doesn't necessarily have to be. You could also drive the reader to sign up for your newsletter, subscribe to your RSS feed, like your Facebook page, or follow you on Twitter. It is VERY important that you get some kind of response out of them so you can contact them for follow ups in the future. Buying traffic only to have it bounce off the page is wasteful and will have you leaving money on the table. If you can gain an email address from the visitor it is very easy to build a relationship with that person and continue to send them quality offers that you can make additional money off of over and over again.
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