How Do Your Landing Pages Work? Tips from Your Web Hosting Provider

You research your target audience. You spend hundreds of dollars on advertisements. The ads work — people come to your website. But if those site visitors aren't becoming customers in good numbers, a look at your landing pages may be in order. This article is presented by your web hosting provider and will address how you can manipulate your landing page to benefit your website.

What are landing pages?

Landing pages are the pages that site visitors land on at your site when they first arrive at it. Most often, the term "landing page" is used for pages designed as entry pages where visitors arrive after clicking on online or email advertisements. They're often optimized for specific keywords.

Websites can have numerous landing pages. Each product, service, site section, and product category may have a landing page, and some pages may be designed as landing pages for advertising campaigns. However, any static page can be a landing page, planned or otherwise. Site visitors can arrive via links from advertisements, emails, other sites, search results, or by typing in the URL directly. The landing page, wherever it is, gives visitors their first impression of the site.

The purpose of advertisements and search engine optimization is to bring visitors to your site. The purpose of landing pages is to get those visitors to take the desired actions once there.

From your landing pages, site visitors will follow a call to action, use the navigation to look around the site, or just leave.

How to make landing pages succeed

Your landing pages need to be relevant to what site visitors are looking for, and the relevant information needs to catch their attention.

Acquire page-specific inbound links. Don't have all your inbound links to your home page. Searchers looking for garden widgets, for example, should be taken directly to your landing page on garden widgets or to a page about the specific garden widget they're looking for. Having advertisements link to landing pages specific to the ad content brings consumers closer to making a purchase.

Make each page work as an entry page. Visitors should be able to know the purpose of the site and of the particular page within seconds. Include key information above the fold — on the screen before people have to scroll. Navigation to the rest of the site should be easy to find, and contact information should be displayed or at least linked to. A search box on every page is useful.

Make the page design work. The design should look professional with a clear font type and size and good contrast with the background color. Place the most important content close to the top of the page, and limit pictures and graphics to those that are related to the landing page offer.

Know your audience. What type of people (age, gender, income bracket, etc.) do your products or services appeal to? What interests them? Keep them in mind as you build and refine your landing pages.

Focus on your goals. Every landing page has a purpose. Typically, the goal is to get site visitors to do one or more of the following:

• Buy products or services listed on or linked to from the landing page
• Use the information available from that page to buy the products or services through a dealer
• Take advantage of a special offer
• Contact you
• Sign up for something
• Take part
• Click on a link
• Become more informed

Know your goals and make them easy to accomplish on each landing page.

Be consistent. Use the same type of language and include the keywords used in advertisements linking to the landing pages. Optimize landing pages for those same keywords so that people will arrive at the same pages via search engine results. Include those keywords in headings. Consistency helps reinforce the message and lead visitors to your goals.

Build trust. Why should people feel safe buying from you? Provide reasons on landing pages:

• Logos to organizations you belong to, such as the Better Business Bureau
• Your refund and privacy policies
• Testimonials

Write clearly and succinctly. Landing pages should have enough information for visitors to accomplish the desired tasks without being overwhelmed. Use clear headings, keep sentences and paragraphs short, put list content in bullet format, and provide the information that visitors are looking for. Write with "you" rather than "we" language to show your audience the benefits of what you offer. Provide factual information; avoid promotional fluff.

Track and analyze your traffic. Do your visitors follow and complete the calls to action, do they stumble around the site and then leave, or do they just click the Back button? Studying your stats will show you how effective your landing pages are.

Test and compare different versions of landing pages In a recent webmaster news roundup, we wrote about Google's Website Optimizer. With this free tool, AdWords Standard Edition customers can try out different combinations of their landing page key features (titles, text, images/graphics, calls to action) and track which combinations are more successful at leading to conversions.

Whether or not you use Google's Website Optimizer, test the effectiveness of your landing pages. Ask people you know if the purpose of each page is clear to them and which versions appeal to them more. Try one version and then another at your site while noting the traffic stats for each version. Everything from word choice and color to location on the page can influence responses to your landing pages.

Related blog articles

• Behavioral Segmentation and Targeting: Engaging Recent and Returning Site Visitors
• Motivate Website Visitors to Buy
• The New Art of Persuasion: What Worked Before Won’t Work Now
• Website Traffic and Conversion Rates
• How Important Is Website Usability?
• Customer Experience and Satisfaction
• Advertising with Google AdWords