By Nick Smarrelli, Published November 4, 2014
You’ve just had your website designed and developed and are extremely happy with the product. You think it looks crisp and clean and provides a great amount of valuable content to attract your customers.
Creating a well-informed website is one of the most important actions your business can take to help boost sales.
However, businesses often overlook the importance of creating a landing page.
What Is A Landing Page?
And how does it differ from any other page on your website?
A landing page is a page that a user arrives at through a 3rd party. This could be in Google’s SERPs (search engine results page). Or the user found the landing page through a Google ad whose purpose was directing the user to take a specific desired action.
A landing page is designed to increase the user’s interaction within your website. The purpose may be, for example, to get the user to sign up for your newsletter. So a landing page in this case could look like this in the conversion process:
- User sees your landing page in the SERP’s and clicks
- They sign up for your newsletter from this page
- You market to that user and guide them through the rest of the sales funnel
If you have an e-commerce website your goal for that landing page is to get the user to make a purchase.
Landing Page Design
An important aspect of a landing page is the design. You want it to look like your website. But you don’t want anything to distract the user from taking the action you desire.
Keep your page clean, make sure there aren’t any ads, videos, etc. that will encourage the user to click elsewhere.
The level of navigation and other page elements you choose to include is up to you. It really depends on your target audience and what you want them to do.
How Is A Landing Page Found?
Now that you’ve created your landing page, how will people find it?
Since your landing page cannot be found in the main navigation of your website (by design), you need to get creative with attracting traffic.
We recommend these four approaches:
- Optimize the page using the Yoast plugin for WordPress. This is one of our favorite plugins as it tells you when your page optimization is poor, OK, or good. Good gives you the best chance of appearing in organic search results.
- Creating a PPC campaign that links the ad to the landing page.
- Promote your landing page on social media, either organically or with Facebook advertising.
- Send the landing page link out in your weekly newsletter to your email subscribers. Don’t just send them the link, make sure it is included in the content somewhere in that email.
The thing to remember with a landing page is that it should not be tied to the main navigation of your website. Don’t allow your visitors to arrive at the landing page by clicking there from your website.
A landing page is meant to be tied to a campaign with a singular goal. If someone gets to a landing page from the navigation on your site, they will be confused by the lack of context.
It’s in the name – “landing” page:
- The user does a search your page appears in the organic listings or
- The user sees an ad on a social channel, remarketing campaign or PPC that links to the landing page.
- The user lands on the page and sees content and a call to action.
- The user converts!
You want a user to find a page that shows up based on their needs, has the information they expect to see, and has an obvious call to action – guiding the user toward your intended conversion.
And conversion is the reward!
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