Thursday 20 August 2009

Effective use of Landing Pages for your Business.

Many businesses, and I am guilty as charged here myself, have just the one webpage to which they direct all enquiries - The "Home" page. Very rarely will this actually be the best business practice and is probably the cause of many a lost order enquiry and many of your website bounces. If your business provides more than just the one product or service or targets more than just the one customer group then most likely you would do better to have a number of different "Landing Pages" each one tailored to suit a different product, service or customer group. If you wish, each landing page is like a substitue home page and should be keyworded and SEO'd (if those are real words) accordingly which will of course have the added effect of increasing your sites chances of higher rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs). For example of you are selling footwear and have a special offer at the moment on shoe insoles there is no point in sending your buyer directly to your home page which by default has to appeal to a broad cross section of people and then expecting them to do a product search to finally find the page they want to see via a process of elimination. Maybe you just purchased all the insoles as a job lot and don't usualy stock them so maybe they don't even get a mention on your home page, then what? Your potential customers should be taken directly from your advertisement or article to the special offer page to see your amazing prices at a single click. Maybe you offer your products to the public but are also willing to sell to the trade at a discount. Then why send all enquiries to the same place? Advertise to both sectors and send enquiries through to their own different landing pages within your site, it is far more professional than having customers clicking all over the place to get to where they want to be. The more clicks a potential customer has to make, the more likely they are to give up and go elsewhere. Equally if you are running PPC campaigns you can have a different landing page for each campaign so that with analytics you can determine which campaign gave the best results and which landing page kept the client on your site the longest.

Once you have your landing pages set up you can target your advertising to different groups of potential buyers. You will have different pages optimised for different keywords and keyphrases rather then trying to make your home page everything to everybody. You will get higher search engine results for a variety of different pages within your site rather than just the one. You can divide your email list so that you don't have to blast out to everybody on the list when something happens that you know will only appeal to a certain sector of your clientele. Overall you will get much better conversion rates and more money in your pocket which can't be bad now can it for a little extra spend and a little more thought to your online presence.