When & Why Should I Use a Landing Page on my Website?

Landing pages are becoming increasingly more important for SEO practices. Now, businesses have to decide when they should utilize them and for what purpose.

More and more often, inbound marketing experts are incorporating landing pages into their SEO strategy. For businesses specializing in more than one product or service, currently in the promotional selling phase or advertising across various user segments (paid search, social media, email campaigns, etc.), there’s a chance that a normal homepage is unsuitable to handle the diverse range of products or services rendered.

On the flip side, simplicity goes a long way in enhancing a visitor’s user experience, and wasted or redundant information will only make your site cluttered. When it comes to a fully optimized website, quantity isn’t the name of the game – it’s quality. And creating excess pages that aren’t needed is only hurting your end game and confusing potential clients and customers.

In another article we discuss “what is a landing page?”. Well now let’s dive into the more complex question of “when do I need a landing page.” Here are a few examples of when you should consider a landing page…

Promotions

Landing pages are useful when a business is offering special offers and promotions because they communicate the value of your discount across various customer bases. For example, separate landing pages may be used to handle promotions for both new people who have subscribed to your company’s service and existing customers. Having unique landing pages for each customer base will allow you to present the information in a targeted way without interfering with everyday operations or changing the overall theme of your website.

Unique landing pages for special promotions can also be created for different campaign sources, such as AdWords or social media. The benefit of developing these pages is cohesive copy that smoothly carries the consumer from advertisement to landing page to conversion.

Click here to see an example of a Pay-per-Click landing page we designed for a client.

Multiple Products or Services

Product advertising can typically be sorted into three categories: product details, shopping cart and homepage. The product details page provides prospective customers/clients with the most important information about the merchandise or service they are most interested in. Regardless of the quality of your product details page, there’s always a chance that your site visitors will wander away from the original page they landed on and lost interest. A standalone landing page is an effective way to send them back to where you want them and get them back on track.

Landing pages can also help you increase your business’s conversion rate (the rate at which leads are converted into customers) by focusing your message as well as helping to make sure the design and content of the landing page works best. This usage of landing pages can be very important when you have a website that depends on driven traffic because there can be upwards of 100 pages funneling through your conversion focus, making it hard to find any leaks, or lost leads, that occur in the funnel.

Traffic Optimization

Once you’ve set up a traffic funnel, you’ll find a bigger issue to contend with: How do you actually attract web traffic and better yet, how do you lure in visitors who will convert to customers?

Chances are you’ll turn to low-cost options like Facebook or Twitter – in addition to paid advertisement. The problem with these types of advertisements is that they offer very little information for the prospective consumer, who will require additional steps along the conversion path to reach your intended goal.

For instance, a potential client in need of legal assistance will want to know more about your law firm before making the big decision to set up a consultation. Likewise, a shopper will want to know more about your product before spending their hard-earned money. The simplest way to lead consumers from “window shopping” to converting is to build a separate landing page chock full of information they will find useful – and to target these pages for each way your customers could come through via advertising.

Breaking your traffic into chunks on separate landing pages also provides your business the benefit of being able to measure traffic better. While it’s true you can also achieve this by purchasing an analytics package to keep track of your social media versus email campaign conversion, it won’t do you any good if making alterations to your analytics harms the conversion rate of your social media accounts or PPC.

Importance of Landing Pages

Given the importance of landing pages to a business, it’s essential if you plan to incorporate a landing page that you do so correctly and in the right situations. If you would like help accomplishing a landing pages that targets the right crows at the right time, contact us anytime. Here at SEO Advantage®, we can help you achieve the best results.

To continue learning how to incorporate landing pages into your inbound marketing strategy, read our related articles in the SEO Knowledge Center.

About SEO Advantage^®

Led by Stone Reuning, SEO Advantage®, Inc. is an online marketing and search engine optimization firm that helps businesses turn their web presence into a powerful revenue generation medium. Our clients enjoy dominance on Google, Yahoo and Bing through a suite of unique pay-for-performance search engine optimization and online marketing services implemented by a multidisciplinary team of SEO engineers, copywriters and web designers. You'll find us referenced in books such as "Writing Web-Based Advertising Copy to Get the Sale" and the BusinessWeek bestseller "The New Rules of Marketing & PR," as well as the popular ebook "The Small Business Blogging Blueprint." Find out more today by calling us at 1-800-366-1639 or email us here.