In this article series we will guide you through the “do’s” and the “definitely do not do’s” of creating effective online marketing campaigns through use of landing pages. First we look at what a landing page is and why they are important to you as a business owner and search engine marketer.
Landing Pages 101
In simple terms, a landing page can be classified as any page by which a visitor enters your site. While this definition is technically accurate, for most of the websites that we come across, this simply means the homepage.
While your homepage is generally considered the primary point of entry, We think its a mistake to treat it as such. Your homepage should serve as a gateway for the information contained on your site, but it is by no means the only point of entrance. Even so, the homepage is an important part of your online marketing strategy, so lets go over what exactly you should use your homepage for.
As a rule of thumb, nothing should be more than 3 clicks away from your homepage. Your homepage should also clearly and effectively communicate three things:
- That your visitor has come to the right place;
- That you are able to alleviate the visitors pain, in the sense that you can provide what they are looking for;
- The purpose(s) of your website; and
- How to get in contact with you.
Once you get past this information and associated design features you have little or no room left (without bombarding your visitor) to actually provide specific keyword targeted content to your visitor about a given topic. Imagine you run a plumbing business. On the homepage you have to provide your user with a number of things like:
- Where you are located and what areas you service
- your experience
- your expertise
- your unique selling proposition
Your keywords for your homepage might include things like: “qualified plumber plumbing service gold coast lowest price”. This would be perfectly acceptable for homepage content and is more or less exactly the sort of copy you are looking to include on your homepage from a usability perspective. But as far as search engine benefit goes, you will be trying to compete with every other qualified plumbing service that claims to have the lowest price – a particularly onerous task.
So from a search engine marketing perspective, if someone clicks onto google and types in “leaky drain pipe” your business is nowhere to be seen even though you have the exact information and can fix the problem that the searcher is after. To solve this problem, the best thing to do would be to create a page about leaky pipes and provide useful information about how to solve the problem. This is what we refer to as a campaign-orientated landing page; a point of entrance to your site other than your homepage. We do this because its much more likely that your searcher is looking for the solution to a problem, rather than to buy a product.
In the next instalment we will look at writing copy, and how to best appeal to your browser.
Loading...