Landing pages are central to the success of your site after a user clicks on a link to your page. Unfortunately, many businesses fail to make the best use of their landing pages, creating frustration for themselves and their users.
A lot of the time a bad landing page comes from a lack of proper consideration for user experience. Too often the focus is on what the business wants, rather than what the user is looking for. As with all aspects of SEO, the behaviour of the user should be central to what you do. Also like all aspects of SEO, it can be easy to get wrapped up in the technicalities of analysing and manipulating user behaviour, and forget to really address what the user wants.
When considering your landing pages, think like a user. The landing page is the first thing they will see in your site. The layout, design and title are the first things they will see on the landing page. What message do you want these things to convey? If the target users for a landing page are significantly different to those for other pages, your site design may need to be altered. The landing page is all about making that specific user feel at home.
Part of this is about focus. For most businesses, the default landing page is the home page. This is fine, but is it really the best page on the site to direct a user with specific needs? Only a determined user will follow through the three or four clicks they need to find the information they want. Each click is a chance for the user to abandon the search and turn to another site.
Landing pages are a chance to sell your site more directly at quite specific users. Whether the landing is the result of a PPC campaign, the result of a promotion on a blog, or because of links you have managed to get, the users clicking through to the page will be after specific things. Landing pages should be tailored to answer the needs of these specific audiences.
Take for example a site that sells clothing. The main keywords directed at Google will be competitive for clothing retail and will naturally lead to the site’s home page. If the site manages to get a link on a blog about fashion designers, however, the better page to link to will be a designer clothing page, as this will appeal more specifically to the blog’s readers.
Even if your landing pages properly address their target users, there are things to consider. Landing pages, like home pages, need to convey trustworthiness, transmit a clear message and win the user over all in one fell swoop. Because they may be internal pages, they also need to mesh with the other pages of the site.
Your SEO consultant should take the search engine optimisation of individual pages into account in your site’s search engine optimisation plan. Landing pages are just an extension of this. Landing pages should be the end result of a well-directed SEO plan, directing users immediately to the most appropriate page, determined by well-focussed keywords. For more information and advice on choosing your landing pages, contact our experts at SEO Consult.
