Despite their simple sound, landing pages are often a confusing topic for website owners. What is a landing page and how does it work? Does every other web page we land on count as a landing page? What is the relationship between landing pages and Google Analytics? Can we optimize landing pages to make them more suitable for conversion and search engines?
We have answered all the respective questions related to what is a landing page for you to understand the importance and types of landing pages.
What is Landing Page?
In digital marketing strategy, a landing page is a web page designed specifically for one purpose: to convert visitors. Whether it’s registering for an event, signing up for a newsletter, donating money to a charity, Advertising campaign for your product or service, a landing page focuses on one main action. The driving force is to focus on the action and eliminate potential distractions, resulting in an increased chance of conversion rates. In digital marketing campaign, it is a must to create these types of landing pages as part of a marketing campaigns.
Example of What is a landing page
A great example is the Dubai Run landing page:
As you can see, the title immediately conveys the main message of the page: Register for the Dubai Run 2022 fitness challenge to participate! The call to action text is crystal clear. Maybe using a different color would make it stand out even more, but it’s still hard to ignore the text. The design of the page is clean and there are no distracting elements that would make it difficult to focus on the message. Moreover, the happy runners on main Sheikh Zayed road in the banner picture offers an additional motivation to apply.
If you scroll down, you will find sections related to the event happened in the past with images, videos and reviews. We may see these secondary buttons as a distraction, but since they only appear when scrolling down, the first view of the web page remains focused on the primary goal: registering participants for said event.
How does the landing pages convert?
Imagine receiving an email from a local nightclub advertising a concert by your favorite band. No doubt you are very excited to get tickets to the event as soon as possible. By clicking on the link in the e-mail or social media ads, you will go to the targeted landing page. When will the event take place? Is it better to use the search bar? Oh wait, there will be another great concert! Hmm.. Maybe first it would be better to ask your friends which concert they would prefer to go to.
The internet is full of distractions, but dedicated landing page try to get rid of them. From the example above, we could see that if we had gone to a landing page that focused exclusively on that concert, provided us with all the important details and an attention-grabbing call to action, information in bullet points, attractive landing page images, complete contact info of seller, we probably would have reached the cart and purchased the concert ticket.
When people click on a marketing campaigns link in an email or on social media, it means you’ve generated interest in the event, charity or whatever else you’re promoting. However, due to the fact that we are constantly exposed to clickable content, we usually choose what our website visitors click on. So if we click on something, it means that we are interested in the topic and probably further down the user journey to the web page.
According to this, there is also a greater chance of higher conversion rates, be it a subscription, ticket purchase or product purchase. So it makes sense to pay attention to the user’s activity and focus on making it as simple as possible for site visitors to take the action we want to achieve.
How do we optimize lead generation landing pages?
When creating a landing page for digital marketing purposes, we first need to decide what action we want to get visitors to take. This is not a very difficult task, especially if our digital marketing campaign has a clear goal. Based on the example above, the goal would be to sell tickets. Once we know the goal, we can start landing page optimization, adding all the essential elements. It is important to focus on the target audience in addition to communicating information.
Basic elements of dedicated landing page: information and persuasion
To convince potential customer to participate or take any other action, we need to customize the landing page content. However, knowledge of the target audience is essential for this. However, there are some elements that are so common that they can be found on every lead generation landing page.
Some example:
- The message forwarding address: what should the user do?
- A call to action (CTA) or a short data capture form that landing page visitors can fill out immediately
- Some important information that the user wants to know before clicking on call to action (for example, the time and place of an event)
- Landing Page Best Practices: an attention-grabbing image or short video on landing page copy (for example, if the invitation is about winning the most modern washing machine, then it is worth presenting the specific washing machine with complete features and functionalities)
- Social proof: a quote from a satisfied user or website visitors
- Payment options: for purchases and donations
Also important: Strive for conciseness and simplicity! If we want to put more emphasis on creating landing pages, we can also get rid of the menu, as it can distract visitors. Also, be careful not to place links to other web pages on the dedicated landing page. If you absolutely need them, put them on the drop-down page. The same applies to all secondary activities, such as the call to action button on the previously mentioned Dubai Run landing page.
A/B Test Landing Page!
Don’t forget to test the landing page! If you’ve already started creating a landing page, you probably already have some idea of how to effectively address your target audience. Especially for this type of high converting landing page, testing pays off. And when the effective landing page is ready, be sure to make a copy of it using the Yoast Duplicate Post plugin so that you can use it as a template for future lead generation landing pages.
Google Analytics Landing Pages
It’s important to note that landing pages for google ads campaign are not the same as Google Analytics landing pages. Google Analytics landing pages are a list of only those web pages that receive the most traffic from external sources.
Landing pages and Search Engine Optimization
Would you like your landing page to rank well and attract search traffic? We can almost hear you saying: Yes, of course! I want perfect search engine optimization practices to be applied on lead gen pages to reach as many potential customer as possible. I created and tested!
We must not forget, however, that a landing page designed specifically for a campaign, which mostly attracts the attention of visitors with the help of digital marketing, is not always the most suitable for Google’s search engines.
We have to ask ourselves, is this the good landing page people really want to find when they search for the topic? Or would you rather read a more comprehensive article with more information on the given topic? Where are these potential customer in the user journey?
Since the specific landing page was designed specifically for high conversion rates, it may not be suitable enough for the search engines, even if people are really searching for the event, competition or campaign that we advertise.
Of course, there are ways to make sure that the landing page is optimized for the exact duration of the given event. Obviously, it’s harder to rank a page that’s focused mostly on conversions, but contains hardly any text.
Placing enough internal links can help you achieve a better ranking and search traffic. If you want to add extra content to your landing page that includes a link to more information on other pages, you might want to put it below the drop down section. In this way, we preserve the original focus (call to action) and prevent people’s attention from being diverted. However, it is important to ask the question here again: what is the exact purpose of this standalone web page? Let’s strive to optimize for just one goal!
Good landing pages for eCommerce products
There is a lot of overlap between the eCommerce product and the successful landing page. However, certain principles apply in designing landing pages focus on conversion, have a clear call to action, include social proof, a visual image or video. A campaign, on the other hand, can have a much more temporary purpose.
Also, product pages are more likely to contain more product-related images and information, making them less focused than a landing page for another type of digital marketing campaigns.
Local landing pages
Last but not least, our website may include local landing pages. These serve a completely different purpose than the campaign landing pages we discussed earlier. If you have a business with several physical locations, the best solution is to create a separate landing page for each existing location, which is optimized for the specific prospective customers.
Conclusion
In digital marketing, a landing page is a page designed to trigger call to action from prospective customers. It is often created as part of a marketing campaign and aimed to generate leads. In this case, the landing page converts the visitor to subscribe, attend an event or buy something. That is why it has very concentrated content.
However, don’t confuse a marketing landing page with Google Analytics landing pages, which are a list of highly targeted landing pages on a given website.
Depending on the purpose of landing pages provide, we can try to optimize the page for search engines, but sometimes it is better if the landing page is focused solely on organic traffic conversion. Whatever you want to do, think about the primary purpose of what landing page offer!
This concludes all the information to understand what is a landing page, now you should create a landing page with effective search engine optimization and digital marketing strategy
