5 Tips for Improving Your Company's Landing Pages

Landing pages are the best way to increase your conversions - the number of website visitors who do something you want them to - buy, register, etc.

By John Brady, President, Theconversionzone.com

Not so long ago a sophisticated e-marketing objective was to attract site visitors. And when Internet Marketing reported to management that the key metric of page visits was on the rise, everyone was happy.

Fortunately it didn’t take too long for smart marketers to get around to analyzing what was happening with all those visitors. All too often the news was – not too much. Visitors came – and they went – without buying anything, signing up for Ezines, or registering for free trials.

Nowadays Internet Marketing is a lot more focused on improving conversions from paid (PPC) and organic search traffic. For the sake of this article we will define a conversion rate as the ratio of visitors to the number of sales (or trials… registrations - whatever objective you decide is a conversion for you).

One of the best ways to increase conversions is to work on improving your landing pages. These are the pages that are designed to receive an incoming visitor who searched on a particular search term. To help you get more conversions out of the site visitors you work so hard to get, here are 5 landing page tips that you should follow:

Develop custom landing pages

This is crucial. Use your site logs or analytics package to find out the major search terms that visitors use when they enter your site. If those visitors are entering on a normal content or catalog page on your site, you are probably losing a lot of customers prematurely. You should seriously consider setting up a custom landing page for each of those major terms
Try: Marketing Sherpa is an extremely valuable source of all kinds of Emarketing advice and case studies. They have several free newsletters.

Be humble - Only testing will give you the right answers

I am always astonished by the confidence some folks have in their own creative judgment. I have learned too many lessons the hard way – the ad I was sure will win doesn’t, and vice versa. Each component on a landing page needs to be tested – headlines, calls to action, amount of copy, pictures, etc. Make sure you have an active testing program in place.
Try: Marketing Profs has some great case studies that will help you understand this issue.

Cut down on outgoing links – focus on the call to action

This is a little counterintuitive for some. But if your goal is a conversion, all activity on the landing page should be focused on your call to action – not on sending visitors off on wild goose chases around your site.
Try: The DMA - Direct Marketing Organization is a very useful resource for all types of marketing resources and suppliers

Improve the SEO on your landing pages

People come to your landing page, possibly because that is where you directed them from Google Adwords or Yahoo PPC. But there is no reason why you can’t get some organic traffic from these pages too. Specific Meta titles and descriptions will help – as will relevant headlines and copy
Try: Search Engine Watch has active Forums and daily newsletters that will help anyone get an expert understanding of SEO issues.

Make your landing pages specific to your keywords

People came to your site because they thought they were going to learn about something very specific - aircraft camshafts for example. If your meta title, meta description, headline, and body copy talks about aircraft engine parts you will immediately turn off most of your searchers. So spend the extra time to customize your most important landing pages. Your conversions will improve, and so will your search rankings in Google and other engines.
Try: There are many services that will help you identify keywords that might be relevant to your business. One of the best is the Keyword Selector Tool that is free at Yahoo. After that, it's up to you to customize your pages to those keywords.