Digital marketing is a delicate dance of creating content that reaches its desired audience, generates a click, and draws the user in for a conversion. Sometimes a headline, subtext, and a phone number are all a user needs to want to connect with a business. Other times, the user may desire a little more information to convince them that your products or services are what they need… so they click in hopes that what comes next provides the information they are searching for. Where that click directs the user is called a landing page.
What Is A Landing Page?
The term “landing page” is thrown around a lot in the digital marketing world, and its broad use can lead to some confusion. A landing page is really just that, any page that a user initially lands on when searching on the internet. This could be a service or product page on your main business website or it could be a separate single-page website created for when users click on a particular advertisement.
Most often, landing pages are designed to keep you on that page, providing the user with all of the information on the particular service or product they are looking for and directing them to a specific call to action.
Designing & Developing Landing Pages
Landing pages are web pages specifically designed to funnel traffic interested in a very specific product or service and increase conversions. They capture a click and woo the user into taking a particular action. How you plan on getting people to actually land on your landing page is important to keep in mind when designing it. Sometimes landing pages are optimized to rank well organically for high intent search terms. Other times they are designed to quickly convert users after clicking on a paid ad.
Organic Landing Pages
The Website Design page on our website is a great example of an organic landing page. The design is simple and content is the leading element. The page was created as such so that when people search terms like “web designer in Boynton Beach”, search engines will serve them with a link to this page in the results (see image below). The page they end up on (the landing page) has valuable content relevant to the term in which they searched.
Non-Organic Landing Pages
Not all landing pages are created with the intent of ranking organically. In fact, many landing pages are created specifically to drive paid traffic from Google Ads, social media ads, radio ads, or other paid marketing initiatives. While landing pages focused on organic traffic must be created in a way that search algorithms favor, the content and layout on landing pages intended for paid advertising use is designed primarily to push users to take a specific action. Each advertising platform has some rules and guidelines to follow in order for them to display your ad, but they are often much less constraining. A landing page primarily used for paid advertising may have much less written text and include more interactive or graphical elements.
What Makes A Good Landing Page?
Regardless of how traffic is directed to a landing page, there are simple elements that any good landing page should have. These include:
- Clearly state what product or service is being offered/promoted
- Showcase the benefits of the product/service/information
- Include a value proposition (Free trial, consult, eBook, etc.)
- Highlight a call to action (Call Now, Buy Today, Schedule a Consult)
- Provide social proof (Testimonials, Ratings, Partnerships)
There are also going to be other aspects that vary from one landing page to another. When determining what should be unique to each landing page, consider the following:
- Who is the target audience?
- Why is this product/service better or different than competitors?
- What is the goal of the page?
- What type of device does most of my audience use?