Website Design
What’s The Purpose of Your Landing Pages?
Sounds like a simple question but the truth is that most businesses owners don’t know and most web designers have stopped asking.
Most websites have become over grown with so much junk that it’s difficult to even figure out what there about, much less there purpose. I’ve seen landing pages that make me feel like I’ve just walked into a crowded store and have 50 salesmen all trying to sell me something at the same time.
The idea is that you create a certain type of landing page for each type of traffic source you are using. Now there are a lot of ways to set up a landing page, for example a landing page can be part of your main site and have the same navigation and page layout as your main site. A landing page like this can be several layers deep built into your main site.
We can also build a microsite that is built around a specific topic. This type of site is designed for a specific audience. A microsite usually has a couple pages of supporting information but the whole site is designed around getting you to do a specific task, rather that task be getting you to make a purchase or apply for some kind of information.
Even though it is a microsite it can still be branded as part of your main site.
Another type of landing page is a stand-alone landing page. This page gives your website visitor one option and that option is either to purchase something or leave. It’s also normal for these pages to have an exit strategy of some sort, like an exit pop up.
As I said before there are a lot of different types of landing pages, and it really depends on the type of traffic and product as to what type of landing page will benefit your business the most.
However, another thing that is good about landing pages is that you are able to track all your traffic going to that page. This means that I can run a Google ad campaign and know which keywords are converting and which ones are not.
This allows me to track my ROI at the keyword level. With this type of traffic I would go with a stand-alone page as there are fewer distractions, and the page can focus on exactly what the web visitor is looking for. In most cases, fewer distractions mean more purchases.
One thing that I would do with the stand-alone page is add some navigation to any important pages on the site that might help with the purchase decision.
You have to look at every page as an entrance page, like a door in the mall that people can go through to get to your store. While the main door needs to be tailored to everyone that is entering the store the side doors can be tailored to the exact department you are going into.
Single products or services are great for stand-alone landing pages. I am sure you’d be surprised at the number of products that have been sold with nothing more than a one page sales letter.
Micro-sites work best when there is more supporting information needed to make the sale. Microsites are great because they work totally separate from your main site and focus totally on the needs of the website visitor.
Now what I want to do is separate the content that is mission critical from that which is just there for the icing on the cake. Mission critical would mean that the page is needed to make or increase revenue. This would exclude things like company mission, job opening, management bios and things like that.
When doing this keep in mind that a meaningful transaction doesn’t have to be the main conversion goal. There are all kinds of small steps that create a psychological momentum towards the end goal. We want to build on our level of trust before getting them to the main conversion point so every click or move in that direction can be counted as mission critical.
What you should have now is a list of mission critical parts that can be tweaked and fine-tuned for better conversion, as well as a list of distractions that we’ll need to look at later.
First thing we want to do is look at the content and ask ourselves if this content helps to deepen our relationship with the website visitor?
We also want to ask ourselves what affect the content would have on the site if it was removed. And who is this page designed for, prospects, clients, business partners, potential partners or competitors?
Your site should be tailored towards potential clients or partners if you are looking to make money with the site. And each critical mission goal on our list is a conversion point that we need to reduce friction on, allowing a visitor a squeaky clean in and out process.
Any action the visitor takes on our site that is measurable and has value will be considered a conversion point.
