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Landing
Paths - Reinventing Landing
Pages
By Ammon
Johns
...
In my last
article, discussing The
3-page Search Engine Optimisation
Technique, we looked at
a classic way of handling the
creation of doorway pages to
suit a multitude of different
search engines and users. Now
I want to share with you some
thoughts about the broader
issue of Landing Pages and
how to optimise them for performance
in real terms - conversions
and sales.
A landing
page is the page where visitors
from specific places, or with
specific interests, will first
land on your site. As such,
whether or not it needs to
be optimised for ranking, it
absolutely must be optimised
to make a good first-impression,
and to engage the visitor,
thus beginning the conversion
process.
In the classic
case, a landing page is specially
built for each major marketing
campaign. One example would
be in having a specialized
landing page for each advertisement
you place in a newsletter.
This would be designed to maximise
the conversion rate by making
an initial sales pitch to the
specific demographic group
that you expect your ad to
attract (based upon what is
known demographically of the
audience that your ad will
be seen by).
This translated
to SEM by thinking of the keywords
you are using, and what that
tells you about the person
making such a search. You can
always gain at least one fact
about the audience your PPC
listing should attract.
Imagine a
hypothetical manufacturer of
widgets. Now these widgets
have three main qualities:
They are cheap, they are high
quality, and they are lightweight.
Traditionally, many search
terms may be sought that relate
to the widgets, and would naturally
include terms like "cheap
widgets", "quality
widgets" and "lightweight
widgets".
All of those
search phrases could well lead
to the same page, but that
may naturally not be optimal.
Instead, look at what the phrases
are telling you. The visitor
arriving from a search for "cheap
widgets" may not care
that your widgets are lightweight.
In fact, that may only make
him wonder if they are as suitable
for his needs as ordinary weight
widgets.
He's not
going to mind so much that
your widgets are of high quality,
since this will further emphasise
value, but if you stress it
too hard, the visitor might
think that he could get cheaper
widgets still if he went for
a lesser quality manufacturer.
So here is
where the landing page comes
in. The page is designed to
maximise conversions based
on what we know of the visitor
who will arrive. Your "cheap
widgets" landing page
makes a unique sales pitch
that emphasises just how very
cheap your widgets are, despite
their high quality, and advanced
lightweight design that means
no loss of robustness, and
excellent value indeed at such
a low price. You focus on price
just as the visitor's search
did.
Meanwhile,
your "quality widgets" landing
page focuses purely on quality,
and mentions the low price
only in a way that makes the
visitor sure this does not
mean any reduction in quality.
Using this method, of dedicated
landing pages built to convert
specific customer groups; you
should see a notable, and sometimes
very dramatic, increase in
your conversion rates.
That's the classic utilisation of landing pages fully outlined. Now I'm going
to take you beyond that. Remember the primary lesson of the 3-page optimisation
technique: That one page may not be enough for all customers and all needs.
Well, allow
me to introduce my special
Landing Paths technique. In
this, the initial landing page
is not just funnelling users
into the same old site that
all other visitors would see.
No, instead we keep the whole
path specific to what we know
about our prospective customer.
If we have
a page about the manufacturing
process, we keep this too focussed
on just how this process makes
our widgets so cheap, or such
high quality, or so lightweight.
We keep the primary focus of
the user in mind all they way
to the sale, but allow him
all the reassurance he may
need in order to take that
sale, a reassurance that one
page alone would be hard-pushed
to make.
How we separate
these paths in our site architecture
is dependant on the existing
architecture, but a dedicated
sub-directory is usually sufficient
to needs.
E.g.
digiwidget.com/widgets/cheap/
digiwidget.com/widgets/light/
digiwidget.com/widgets/quality/
Now you can
of course cross-link the main,
base site into these specialist
interest paths if you wish,
by allowing visitors to select
early on in the main site their
own primary interest. The following
is a hypothetical example of
this:
The amazing
widgets produced by DigiWidget.com
are thus cheap, and lightweight,
while maintaing the very highest
of quality.
Select the area of primary interest to you:
¨ Lowest
prices on our superb widgets
(links to /widgets/cheap/ path)
¨ Special lightweight design of our widgets (links to /widgets/light/ path)
¨ Amazing high quality of our widgets. (links to /widgets/quality/ path)
These landing
paths can be exceptionally
high-value in all marketing
campaigns, not just SEO or
pay-per-click SEM uses.
Remember
that the average ecommerce
site manages a conversion rate
of under 2 percent. By careful
and considered use of landing
paths, you should be able to
double the average conversion
rate that you had without the
paths. I have used these successfully
to do exactly that, to double
the conversion rates seen from
PPC listings. In tandem with
optimisation for the primary
landing page, the same doubling
can be achieved with organic
SEO searches too.
Remember,
no good salesman makes an
identical pitch to all prospective
customers. Instead he looks
for clues about the customers
main interest and then tailors
his pitch to match. With
landing paths, you can enable
your website to do exactly
the same thing.
...
About The Author
Ammon Johns is a world renowned
Internet Marketing Consultant,
who lives in the UK. He is
an active participant and Administrator
of the Cre8asite
Forums.
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