Landing Pages are the cornerstone of any SEO Campaign
What are landing pages? A Landing Page is basically a specifically targeted page that a visitor sees when they arrive at your website, be it from another website, or from a search request via google. It is the page that YOU want the customer to see first, and the one which will give your greatest chance of conversion.
Landing pages for Visitors
Why is the first page that the visitor sees so important? Quite simply it can make or lose you a sale or enquiry.
In modern web practices, visitors need information as quick and easy as possible. With the hundreds of web sites appearing selling similar services to your own, you need to get the information to the visitor in the quickest time and most productive manner. There is nothing worse than someone arriving at your website and having try and dig out the correct page from your menu, or having to use the 'search' function to find the product that they've already just typed into the search bar at google. Visitors will no longer put up with the inconvenience of poor site or product deployment as they did just a few years ago.
When you give the customer the correct landing page that is presented to them in a quick and easy to read manner, they get the information they required with minimal clicks. The overall site retention is increased, and bounce rate goes down. This gives you the best possibility of converting that visit into a sale. Quite simply, landing pages are one of the most important aspects of any website.
One of the biggest mistakes a website can make (and many SEO Companies overlook) is not getting the relevant page listed in the search engines for the relevant search term, and that brings us to why Landing pages are so important for search engines.
Landing Pages for Search Engines
Search engines like pages themed around a particular phrase, it makes them easy to discover what the page is about and allows them to make matches based on the search term they've just been given by the visitor.
When you're creating a landing page for your visitor (as above), then you're also essentially telling the search engines 'this is the page about xxxxxxx, this is the one i want in the search listing for the xxxxxx term', assuming it is done correctly of course. If the search engine fails to differentiate between your landing page and another slightly similar page on your website, you will lose search placements. This is why Landing pages for Search Engines is so important. Get the balance right, and your listing in google will be for the page you want, and it'll be in the position you want it.
Take a look around google, and see how many homepages are being returned for a keyword search instead of the landing page, and you'll notice its quite a large percentage. There are underlying reasons for this, normally one or more of the following:
- The site is not portaying its pages well enough to be themed for a particular term.
- The site is trying to catch too many phrases on its homepage (a classic mistake).
- A little known underlying matching process used by google.
Points 1 and 2 are easy to fix. Point 3 is little known about (even to the search engine community) and comes from knowledge gained from experience and experimentation, and it takes a lot of time to discover. We noticed this matching process some time ago, and have successfully implemented it into several websites with very good results. Around 70% of terms that we have been targeting for clients return the correct landing page in google, with some sites showing near 100%.
For further information on how we can help your website and Landing Page Optimisation please call us on 01283548989 of use the enquiry form.
Last changed: Oct 05 2009 at 11:02 AM
BackComments
| None Found |
Add Comment
