16 replies to this topic

[EGS]

I have one concern lately with two e-commerce sites of mine, and that is whether or not to create landing pages.

How effective are landing pages? When should landing pages be used? Should or could there be one landing page for the entire site [that summarizes the site, its products/services, etc], or should their be a landing page per product/service?

When should landing pages be used? Would it be appropriate to use landing pages for both visitor-to-customer conversion AND search engine optimization (through keyword density and other SEO tactics), or is it more appropriate for one use over the other?

Can and should landing pages be used for PPC-marketing and other marketing/advertising campaigns? What about link-building and link purchases - should landing pages be the pages/links that you link to?

In an e-commerce world, the one thing I really like to see are visitor-to-customer conversion. A lot of traffic means nothing if you don't make the sales.

This thread really asks a question about landing pages and the effectiveness and usefulness of them, but it also conflicts internet marketing vs. SEO, and which should be used, or whether or not both can be used at the same time, with sure effectiveness.

[BobetteKyle]

Generically, a "landing page" is the page on your site that a visitor enters on -- so you already have landing pages. You are right to focus on conversions. Keeping that in mind, for every advertising campaign or inbound link, have the visitor "land" on a page that will follow-through with that visitor's expectations. In other words, the advertising message has to be reinforced -- or the promise delivered upon -- in order to encourage conversions. Sometimes you already have a page that fits the bill, other times you'll have to make a new page.

As far as Internet marketing conflicting with SEO, you should be using both IMO. They are all part of the same goal: optimizing profit through satisfied customers. If it turns out you have several similar pages to support advertising programs and you think this would hurt you SEO-wise, then exclude those pages from the search engines. Don't forget to test page layout for conversion rates, also.

[EGS]

Generically, a "landing page" is the page on your site that a visitor enters on -- so you already have landing pages. You are right to focus on conversions. Keeping that in mind, for every advertising campaign or inbound link, have the visitor "land" on a page that will follow-through with that visitor's expectations. In other words, the advertising message has to be reinforced -- or the promise delivered upon -- in order to encourage conversions. Sometimes you already have a page that fits the bill, other times you'll have to make a new page.

As far as Internet marketing conflicting with SEO, you should be using both IMO. They are all part of the same goal: optimizing profit through satisfied customers. If it turns out you have several similar pages to support advertising programs and you think this would hurt you SEO-wise, then exclude those pages from the search engines. Don't forget to test page layout for conversion rates, also.

Thanks for the reply, Bobette.

Do landing pages make a site easier to navigate through for customers, ie, should I link to landing pages from my site's homepage to help boost sales and spark possible customer interest?

Also, should I link to landing pages when I purchase links and advertising, and also focus on optimizing landing pages?

Do you have any good tips or resources to help me create a good landing page? I know landing pages have a tie with imagery these days, and I am no designer...I really don't know what a good landing page will consist of. I would hate to have my site's visitors walk through a series of advertisements/landing pages, just to find what they're looking for, because most-likely, they'll be turned off and leave my site.

[ScottSalwolke]

A landing page for pay per click should take people directly to the type of product their looking for. Likewise your navigation should direct visitors to your site to the page without them having to search hard to find the link. Forum member Karon had an interesting post on her blog about e commerce sites and their navigation
http://www.marketing....com/blog/?p=73

[nethy]

Hi EGS,

I think there might be a little confusion with terms.

Simple Meaning
As stated above a 'landing page' just means the first page a visitor hits (lands on). With ppc you get to choose your landing page. So if you have traffic you technically have landing pages.
Common Meaning
Since ppc is under your control, landing pages have become a big focus. Google and others are often encouraging you to have good optimised landing pages. So landing page has become a sort of shorthand for: 'Landing page that has been created and/or optimised specifically to help convert paid advertising visitors'. That's usually what is meant by the above.
To confuse things
To confuse things, a lot of people also refer to SEO landing pages or something similar. That basically means pages specifically designed and optimised to draw organic visits (rank) & convert them. YOu also hear people saying things like 'every page needs to be landing page'. Which of course is true because visits can start anywhere, but confuses the term even more.

What people do with them
As landing pages is just whatever page a user sees first there are no hard rules. But when people are giving them attention these are some characteristics of many landing pages:
1 - Clear heading/images/content & specific content - Tell a searcher they have reached where they need to reach (reduce bounce rate)
2 - Clear Calls to action, usually above the fold - Clear call(s) to action (doesn't have to be 'buy' it can be 'see more' or 'browse'.
3 - Reduced navigation - in attempt to reduce the # of choices and direct the visitor to where they want to go.

For eccomerce this might mean just putting together a category page that is super relevant to the search or it might mean a 'stand alone page' that I call introductory page. The idea is that someone searches for say 'checkered lederhosen' you give them a page with checkered lederhosen in or near the title, an image of checkered lederhosen & a few checkered lederhosen related links:
1- buy checkered lederhosen
2 - See photos of our staff in checkered lederhosen
3 - Join or newsletter to receive checkered lederhosen updates

When should landing pages be used? Would it be appropriate to use landing pages for both visitor-to-customer conversion AND search engine optimization (through keyword density and other SEO tactics), or is it more appropriate for one use over the other?

You can, but not every landing page would be good for this. The reason for that is that optimising a page for SEO, also (not coincidentally) is very similar to trying to get your visitors (already on the site) to visit that page. So if the page doesn't make sense mid browse (like an introductory page) you may not want to do that.
What you may want to do is work on those pages that you see that SEO visits are landing on already (see 'top landing pages' in Google Analytics)

Can and should landing pages be used for PPC-marketing and other marketing/advertising campaigns?

Yes, that is their main/conventional use.

In an e-commerce world, the one thing I really like to see are visitor-to-customer conversion. A lot of traffic means nothing if you don't make the sales

Great. Landing page optimisation is mostly about making better use of the traffic you're already getting. Not so much about more traffic (as I said, that's sort of stretching the term)

internet marketing vs. SEO, and which should be used, or whether or not both can be used at the same time, with sure effectiveness.

Well there is a good bit of synergy between them & they rarely (IMO) conflict.
Also, if one works for you the other probably will too. However, in some cases, usually due to your relative advantage in one or the other and/or competitiveness of the two, one will overshadow the other.
But I'd say that for e-tail, in most conventional cases, it is a good idea to have a bit of both.

[MakeMeTop]

To echo Nethy - landing pages are a crucial part of PPC campaigns - where a "call to action" should be on a page which has been specifically adapted to suit the query from the surfer. By looking carefully at conversion data and testing different layouts (moving the "buy now" button - changing colours etc), hopefully the ideal landing page may be created - and you may have different layouts (but identical content) for different demographics and different terms for the same product - something that you should not do for organic search. As such, these types of duplicate landing pages should not made available for crawling.

For organic SEO - every page landed on is a "landing page" and to judge effectiveness, have a look at path analysis on your most popular terms (what the most common path to a buying action is). If you get a lot of traffic but no-one buys or the path is to complex - then an adjustment to the most commonly landed on page may be justified.

[EGS]

To echo Nethy - landing pages are a crucial part of PPC campaigns - where a "call to action" should be on a page which has been specifically adapted to suit the query from the surfer. By looking carefully at conversion data and testing different layouts (moving the "buy now" button - changing colours etc), hopefully the ideal landing page may be created - and you may have different layouts (but identical content) for different demographics and different terms for the same product - something that you should not do for organic search. As such, these types of duplicate landing pages should not made available for crawling.

For organic SEO - every page landed on is a "landing page" and to judge effectiveness, have a look at path analysis on your most popular terms (what the most common path to a buying action is). If you get a lot of traffic but no-one buys or the path is to complex - then an adjustment to the most commonly landed on page may be justified.

I see your post is more directed to PPC Marketing, and the crucial-ness of the landing page in terms of sales etc.

My concern right now is - when I purchase links and banner advertising on sites etc - should I link those links etc to a landing page, to hopefully encourage/increase sales conversion? And if so, should I optimize those landing pages for search engines too, so that the links to them will hopefully increase the rankings for the pages? But when I think about that, would that be good or bad, because it would cause confusion for navigating through my site, if one page about the same product/service outranks the other.

[MakeMeTop]

I'm confused

What has rankings got to do with landing pages?

Although I can understand that you want the best ranking pages to be the best converting ones.

[EGS]

I just wanted to add Randy's response within this thread for archive, so that I can look back to this thread later and receive a full understanding of what everyone is talking about.
I have so many questions right now...and it's becoming difficult for me to word out my questions, concerns, and confusions correctly.

I saw it but really didn't have much to add. Bobette, Barry/MakeMeTop and especially Nethy seemed to cover all of the bases pretty well. Every page is indeed a landing page, potentially.

For those landing pages that are being pointed to by PPC advertising I tend to cut down the number of links on the page and/or make sure it's very, very evident which path I want people to take. As opposed to there being too many choices, some of which may lead to other conversion paths and some of which might not.

I don't do any banner advertising per se, but I'd probably try to treat at least some of those the same way by pointing them to something other than the home page. Under the theory that by conversion testing and learning from tests on my dedicated landing pages I might be able to glean some wisdom to put towards the home page that would help conversions not only from the paid advertising, but also from so-called free traffic the search engines send to the page.

FTR, I'm of the camp that believes it's practically impossible to effectively conversion test a Home Page. There is simply to much noise and other things happening there that can drastically affect conversion rates from day to day, week to week and month to month. So until someone has a pretty thorough background in conversion analysis I tend to steer them away from trying to test stuff on their home page. Being able to recognize and control all of the noise that naturally happens on a home page is really a art form, something that has to be learned.

Of course this doesn't mean you can't learn something from more structured and focused tests that can then be applied to the home page.

R

Edited by Randy, 31 July 2008 - 08:07 PM.
Corrected one of my own typos! LOL

[EGS]

A landing page for pay per click should take people directly to the type of product their looking for. Likewise your navigation should direct visitors to your site to the page without them having to search hard to find the link. Forum member Karon had an interesting post on her blog about e commerce sites and their navigation
http://www.marketing....com/blog/?p=73

I am looking into this article - thank you for linking me to it by the way - and am really thinking about how I should reconstruct my site's navigation. It's making me really want to, but I am just questioning how exactly to.

I think I am having a problem coping the fact that content will be needed on some of the pages, and I don't know how exactly or where exactly to place the content, because long text etc seems to drive potential customers away from sites (if they don't see what they're looking for within the first few seconds of browsing, usually they hit their browser's back-button and it's back to the Google search results, correct?)..

[Randy]

And if so, should I optimize those landing pages for search engines too, so that the links to them will hopefully increase the rankings for the pages?

There's a huge disconnect between a page ranking well and converting well. In fact, in some cases the two can be completely at odds with one another when you start to consider well ranking pages tend to rank well for lots of phrases, which by necessity can also mean you're introducing a lot of noise and unqualified traffic into your conversion tests. Meaning you need to account for all of the additional noise and things that can have disasterous effects on conversion tests if you don't know what you're doing.

Double edged sword that one!

[EGS]

Nethy,

Your post was very informational and I thank you for that. That helped clear a bit of confusion that I had about the way my site should be structured in terms of navigation.

I do have to ask this question though: how exactly do I optimize a landing page?

I'd like my landing pages - as I am sure most have this same objective as well - to be optimized for both search engines and visitors. But, how can I accomplish this with a minimal amount of content?

From my experiences and in my mind, I see landing pages most influential to the visitor if they have a lot of images - customers want to see what they're searching for, or at least something related to what's being offered. Imagery, I imagine, is very important, but that leads to this question: where does the content go?

In the search engine world, we all know that content is king, especially with SEO and search engine rankings. My guess is that the landing page has to contain a little bit of both, but how? For SEO, usually keywords need to be dense etc...how can I accomplish this without being "spammy" on a landing page?

[BobetteKyle]

EGS, MarketingExperiments.com has done a lot of hands-on research about landing page optimization. While much of the info is given through the certification classes, there is also a lot in the free area. You may find some good info there. The optimal layout, colors, etc. is going to vary with each site (and maybe even customer source...if different groups of customers have different goals or are at different points in the purchasing process). The general procedure for improving yours is to first test different general layouts and text lengths (rotate two or three designs). Once you have a general layout that works better than what you currently have, start working on wording of individual elements (title, call to action, etc.) and the visuals (placement on the page, colors, etc).

Also, short text is not always better. Sometimes longer converts better.

[Jill]

But, how can I accomplish this with a minimal amount of content?

Easy. Add more content.

[nethy]

I do have to ask this question though: how exactly do I optimize a landing page?

I'd like my landing pages - as I am sure most have this same objective as well - to be optimized for both search engines and visitors. But, how can I accomplish this with a minimal amount of content?

From my experiences and in my mind, I see landing pages most influential to the visitor if they have a lot of images - customers want to see what they're searching for, or at least something related to what's being offered. Imagery, I imagine, is very important, but that leads to this question: where does the content go?

In the search engine world, we all know that content is king, especially with SEO and search engine rankings. My guess is that the landing page has to contain a little bit of both, but how? For SEO, usually keywords need to be dense etc...how can I accomplish this without being "spammy" on a landing page?

Hi EGS,
Again, I think there might be some semantic confusion. 'Optimizing' means 'improving the page (usually increasing conversions) generally. It has sort of come to mean optimisation expirements/split-testing/multivariate testing. IE the use of a certain toolset to optimise a page.

I can't tell you how to optimise your pages, because that necessarily depends on the details. There are also many ways to do this. Sometimes optimising a 'landing page' means that you are not optimising it for the search engines.

The ideal way to optimise a page (IMO) is to start from best practices & common sense. The use testing tools. I'm not experienced in banner advertising but I think that some unique needs here are visual 'scent.' IE, make the image of the landing page similar to the image on the banner.

To learn about optimising through testing check out:
http://www.marketingexperiments.com
They run you through experiments constantly and you can learn a lot by reading over them.

For a free (and pretty easy) tool try:
http://services.goog...5095/index.html

Optimising 'SEO landing pages' (IMO) is a completely different game to optimising for paid advertising. The first is more about good site design in general. It's hard to use testing tools & you need to optimise (usually) page both for landing & 'normal' use.