Many businesses treat landing pages on their website as an afterthought, but they really shouldn’t. The truth is, landing pages are focused web pages that are very good at converting website visitors into leads, as well as providing an opportunity to boost website SEO: landing pages have the highest conversion rate of all signup forms, at 23%.
Visitors arrive on landing pages from paid campaigns, social media posts, or another page on your website. Landing pages target a specific audience and/or product, all the while directing the visitor toward an action you’d like them to take, like signing up for a newsletter, booking or call, or making a purchase.
With this in mind, there are multiple relevant and important reasons why your business needs at least one landing page! Let’s take a closer look.
1. Increasing Conversions
The numbers say it all: an effective landing page strategy can increase conversions by over 50%! Whether you’re targeting a specific audience or offering a promotion, a landing page gives you the opportunity to really home in on the action you want your potential customer to take.
For example, if you own a pet grooming business that has a special 2-for-1 offer for grooms this month, you might run an ad on social media to promote this offer. This ad then links to a landing page on your website that allows the potential customer to take whatever action you’d like, for example, booking a call to schedule an appointment, or even scheduling the appointment itself!
Additionally, if you have more than one promotion on at a time, you can create landing pages for each of the promotions. Landing pages are all about being targeted as possible, and having more than one allows you to highlight all possible promotions and target each audience accordingly.
2. Offering Focus for Your Visitor
The hyper-focus of a landing page goes hand in hand with why landing pages are so successful at lead generation, and this success is due to two important factors:
Attention Ratio
This is the ratio of the number of actions it is possible to take on a specific webpage to the number of things that can lead to customer conversion.
For example, a homepage might have an attention ratio of 24:1 (i.e. there are 24 potential distractions or links on the page against the one action you actually want the customer to take).
On a landing page, the attention ratio is much smaller, usually 1:1, and as a result, it makes it much easier for a customer to navigate the exact path you’d like them to take: they only have one choice!
Message Match
A landing page retains the tone and messaging that originally got your visitor to the landing page. That is, the landing page must reinforce the “mission” that the customer set out on originally, whether it was to purchase a product, book a call, or cash in on a promotional offer. Again, this encourages the customer to stay focused on the task at hand, without being confused or distracted by anything else.
In this example landing page from Shopify’s website, the CTA is front and centre, making it easily locatable for a visitor. Additionally, the page is aesthetically pleasing and features few distractions to deter the customer from the desired action, which on this landing page is entering your email address.
3. Collecting Personal Information
Another major benefit to landing pages is the ability to collect — with consent! — personal information about your target audience, as is seen in the Shopify example above. Often, landing pages feature a sign up form, including the customer’s name and email address in exchange for an offer or more information that your website is offering.
This means the customer can be targeted through an email marketing campaign, offering another way to follow up on potential leads, just in case the landing page itself doesn’t succeed in driving the visitor toward a purchase, as well as creating potential upsell opportunities. A marketing automation service is the best way to do this efficiently and easily.
4. Offering an Opportunity for A/B Testing
Sign up forms also provide intel on which of your offers are attracting the most attention, as well as where the gaps are in the buyer journey. Is one landing page getting more sign ups than another? Did someone sign up for an email newsletter, but eventually unsubscribe without ever making a purchase? This information allows you to comb through your marketing strategy and determine what can be eliminated or optimized.
5. Boosting Your SEO Rankings
Despite the fact that a low word count might seem to detract from the possibility of ranking high in searches, it is possible to design your landing page in a way that makes high rank possible. Landing pages can be designed specifically to convert from paid ads, while also ticking the boxes of optimal SEO ranking. When optimized properly, these landing pages can help grow your organic traffic in the long term.
It can be tricky, but not impossible, to find this balance between conversion and ranking, but the effort is certainly worth the reward. The above example, taken from Unbounce’s website, shows that using a bit more text than you might on a standard landing page has more content for search engines to crawl through, without being too distracting or overly information-heavy.
The importance here is to create an SEO-friendly landing page through keyword targeting, useful content, and potentially offering additional calls to action (which might lead to fewer conversions, but a higher SEO ranking). Although highly focused and specific, there is flexibility to landing pages that lends itself to the needs of your business and overall marketing strategy.
As a result, landing pages serve as attractive and user friendly utility pages for your business. So, the more landing pages you have, the more opportunities to land on the first page of search results: the first five search results account for 67.6 percent of all clicks, while positions six through 10 account for only 3.73 percent. At this point, using landing pages to your advantage is practically a no brainer!
Don’t Forget to Ask For Help!
If you need help strategizing and creating your landing page, TechWyse is here to help. We create attractive, effective landing pages that generate the leads you want. Don’t hesitate to get in touch!
