When attracting online visitors to your website you have seconds to convince them to stay. Whether coming from a social media page, a blog post, or an online ad, you need to guide your visitors directly to the information they seek or you risk losing them.
In an ideal world, your visitors would fall in love with your site and spend hours exploring every page; in the real world, you have to bring the info directly to the viewer. But how?
Landing pages can be very effective at engaging visitors and enticing them to stick around.
What Is a Landing Page?
A landing page is an individual page that a visitor is brought to in response to clicking on an ad, promotion, CTA, or other type of offer. Landing pages are created specifically as a path for the viewer to engage with you and your business and provides information that is an extension of whatever they clicked on.
It’s best practice to lead a visitor that has clicked on an ad to a landing page, rather than your homepage or other website pages, because it allows you to engage them with the specific information that initially attracted them to your business.
Why Use Landing Pages?
When you have seconds to engage a viewer, you want a landing page that provides the desired information immediately and clearly.
Viewers, especially new visitors, can be overwhelmed by too much information at once. A carefully crafted landing page will guide viewers in the right direction, leading them further down the sales pipeline.
Landing pages allow you to focus on a specific goal, which in turn increases conversion rates by guiding the viewer towards a certain desired action. This simplifies your visitor’s experience by providing only the information promoted in the original post or ad.
How to Use Landing Pages
The most important aspect of a landing page is that it is relevant to the post or ad to which it is linked.
When your viewer lands on that page, you want to provide exactly what was promised by the CTA that got them there.
To get your viewer to take the desired action, you must use CTAs that tell the viewer what their next step should be. Limiting navigation will help ensure that your viewer continues on their conversion path. This will also prevent the viewer from becoming overwhelmed by the site and leaving because they could not find the information they seek.
Don’t forget about SEO! Even if the primary goal of your landing page is to convert visitors from other sources, landing pages can still help to increase your visibility and ranking. It’s important to focus your SEO on the goals on this landing page, so be sure to include keywords relevant to the topic. These keywords should be included in the page content, links, meta description, and headings.
Landing page URLs are also the ideal place to use UTM codes.
Including UTM codes in your shared links will allow you to track data about your visitors which can then be used to determine the effectiveness of the campaign.
What you use landing pages for is entirely up to you! Depending on your unique goals and campaigns, you can tailor landing pages to fit your business’ specific goals.
One great way to use landing pages is to offer the viewer something in return for visiting your site. Landing pages that offer ebooks, newsletter subscriptions, app downloads, or special offers will encourage viewers to follow your link. You can then also use this opportunity to ask visitors for contact information, which will allow you to increase your audience and contact those visitors in the future.
Ultimately, your landing page will be custom designed to fit your needs. Experiment with landing pages to determine what offers and formats resonate best with your target audience.
Thanks for reading,
Christine
