Landing Pages: Are you doing it right?

However a visitor gets to your site, they can only see one page first. This first page is known as the ‘landing page’, and your visitors’ landing experience is crucial to the success of your site. The catch is that, depending on where they’ve come from, exactly which page that is could (and should!) be different for everyone. Many websites are built with the idea that the first page any potential customer will see is the home page, but by providing your visitors with content that is specifically and uniquely targeted to their needs, you should experience a dramatic increase in conversion rates.

An important thing to understand is that the landing pages designed for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are very different form the landing pages designed for organic search engine optimisation (SEO).

Landing pages for SEO

Landing pages built for SEO live inside your website’s main structure. They are part of your site index and contain copy that is designed to get you noticed by Google. These landing pages are better described as Gateway or Bridge pages and are specifically designed to get crawled by the search engine spiders.

Imagine for a moment that you had a health product that was suitable for treating a number of completely different medical ailments. By creating individual pages for each ailment, you will be much more likely to get found by people looking for such remedies. This is because the pages are responding well to long tail search terms.

A common mistake people make, though, is to create multiple versions of what is essentially the same page, and simply change a few pieces of text such as the heading and a few keywords, in an attempt to get found by search engines. Unfortunately, this approach is dangerous, as it can be frowned upon by search engines and can potentially get you blacklisted — which would mean you don’t get found at all.

A far safer and more effective approach is to make each page more relevant to the search phrase. Each landing page needs to be approached from the customer’s perspective and have content that is specific and relevant to the topic of the page.

Landing pages for PPC

We’ve already seen how Landing Pages built for SEO have limitations. SEO landing pages require compromise in order to get noticed by Google (safely), and are less than optimal for conversion. Landing pages built for PPC ads have none of these restrictions, as they live outside your website’s main structure and cannot be found in your site index.

Landing pages for PPC are specifically designed for conversion and not for getting noticed by Google. Because your not even trying to get noticed by search engines, you can have complete flexibility to focus on conversion alone. Since you’re spending good money on PPC ads to send prospects your way, it makes sense to maximise this spend by designing your pages to be much more persuasive and focussed on conversion. In practice, this means that they would typically have much less copy, perhaps be more graphically rich, and have very strong and immediate calls to action.

Another key benefit of PPC Landing pages is that they really help with measurement. By deliberately keeping these pages away from search engine spiders and not reachable from your website, you have total control on how traffic gets to these pages. This means you can measure and test effectiveness of PPC adverts and their corresponding landing pages much more effectively.

A further benefit of landing pages for PPC is that you have complete freedom to make as many similar landing pages as you like without any risk of getting blacklisted. Imagine you have a product and there are a hundred key phrases that people use when searching for that product. Since landing pages for PPC are not being indexed by search engines, you are completely free to create 100 very similar pages that are message-matched. Message matching is where you match the message presented in the Google Ad with the search phrase, and further match this through to the landing page. This is much better for the customer as it improves their experience, and has a much better chance of conversion.

Next week: Building better PPC landing pages.