Back in 2011, industry commentators were blogging about “the rising importance of landing pages.” Well, guess what? Since then, the demand for good landing pages that deliver lead generation has risen exponentially.
With the holidays coming up, there’s still time to deck the halls of your website, not with boughs of holly but with landing pages that convert your holiday traffic into viable leads for 2014. We took a look at where landing pages have come from, where they’re going and why they’ll get you anywhere you want to take your business.
Having a Purpose
Everything on the web has a purpose. Business blogging exists to develop your thought leadership and drive traffic to your site. Social media exists for virtual networking purposes. Your website is your online brochure. And landing pages? They exist to capture information from users who click on your ads and promos. Which one is really the driver of sales leads? The one that gets the prospect to tell you who he is, of course. That’s your landing page. Effectively, it’s the page a user lands on when he clicks on something, and there are lots of traditional dos and don’ts that determine how well they work.
What’s the Buzz About?
So what’s all the buzz about landing pages, and how do you make what’s essentially a longstanding concept deliver lead generation for your business? By creating optimized landing pages, that’s how. Not just regular landing pages, where you have a promo picture and a couple of bullet points, with a downloadable white paper or newsletter subscription option. What you need is a page optimized for SEO, which presents quality content using researched keywords in a density acceptable to Google’s recent Hummingbird update. Images with appropriate alt tags, and links using unique anchor text.
Go Big For the Holidays
According to research by HubSpot, the number of landing pages you have makes a huge difference to the number of leads you generate. Companies that increased their number of landing pages from 10 to 15 saw leads increase by 55 percent! And when they went up to 40 landing pages, leads went up by more than double the number. This applied across both B2B and B2C companies.
The good news is that there’s still time to make those December promos you’re in the process of launching count toward next year’s revenue. Don’t just create a standard ol’ landing page where the user can click to buy the product you’re discounting for Christmas; make the page work for you by optimizing it for related search terms. Add links to other sections of your website so that each landing page becomes a lead generation channel that guides your user to his next stop.
Take Your Landing Pages To the Top
A landing page optimized for both PPC and SEO has got to work for conversions too, or you won’t make the December sales you’re hoping for. But there’s no reason why it can’t do double duty if you do it right. Here’s what you need to make it work:
- Create each landing page around the relevant call to action. Keep the copy succinct and focused. Make a different landing page for each market segment. Not only does this increase your number of landing pages effortlessly, it’s also specific and customized for the person you’re trying to reach.
- Use SEO and lead generation conventions such as keyword-focused title tags and meta description.
- Combine this with everything you ever learned about email marketing subject lines and blog headings – make your title compelling enough to capture the user’s attention in the four seconds you have to do it in.
- Set up the page using all the tricks of the formatting trade—easily scannable headlines, bulleted and numbered lists and multimedia.
- Add some links for credibility. Link to your blog, your site and an authoritative source or two. Source inbound links from good quality sites.
Don’t waste this opportunity to make landing pages for holiday promos that serve you well into the new year.
