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Understanding Landing Pages

General
Are you struggling to get your website to rank organically for the right keywords? Or perhaps you are getting traffic to your website, but for some reason they just aren’t converting to a sale?

There’s nothing more frustrating than doing a quick Google search and seeing your competition outrank your site in the search results. One of the easiest ways to help overcome this scenario is through the use of landing pages. Although landing pages are a very effective tool to help optimize your website and increase conversion rates, you do need to make sure you’re utilizing this tool in the right way.

First off, let’s examine the two types of landing pages. It’s extremely important to understand the difference between the two, because they have completely different purposes!

A general landing page has a purpose of providing content for both search engines and visitors. For example, if you are selling tables and you create a landing page that is full of content specific to wood tables, this provides the search engines with the content needed to help enhance your opportunity to be shown in the search results when someone is searching for a ‘wood table’ related term. These types of landing pages should be chock full of keywords, tags and content. They are geared more towards the search engine than an actual user. But, keep in mind that a customer can also see these pages, so it’s important that they read well and help drive a customer into taking the next step towards a conversion. These landing pages should be branded to match the website and provide an easy way for the visitor to navigate to the original website.

The second type of landing page is a conversion-based landing page.  These types of pages have one goal – a call to action that is tied to a direct conversion. You don’t typically see any navigation on these pages. The goal is to keep the visitor on the page and provoke a conversion right from this page. In fact, one case study found that when a navigation bar was removed from conversion-based landing pages, conversions went up 100%!

Conversion-based landing pages are tied to specific advertising campaigns. They mirror the ad that drove the visitor to the page and the content on this page is designed to funnel a visitor to one specific call to action. So for example, if you see an ad for tire specials and you click on it, you go to a page that specifically matches the message in the ad. The page shows an option to schedule an appointment or a coupon to print to redeem the special offer.  In doing this, you have made it simple and easy for the consumer to get right to the content they are looking for.

There’s so much information and so many options online – keep it simple and help direct searchers to the information they are looking for. This in turn helps boost your rankings with Google. By providing more relevant content, you have a much better chance of Google deeming your website as worthy of ranking highly for a users search phrase. In fact, for both SEO and paid search, Google will provide quality landing pages with higher organic rankings and lower bid amounts in PPC. And even better, you’ll start seeing higher conversion rates from your customers!

When it comes to enhancing your online presence and increasing your conversion rates, it’s no walk in the park! Things are changing on a daily basis and one strategy that might work one month may not work the next. It’s important to constantly monitor your website traffic, stay in touch with what your customers are looking for and then adapt your tactics accordingly!
 
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