How to Boost Your Conversion Rates with Landing Pages
If you have several different products, but only one web site to sell them with, there is a lot of potential for improvement. Even if you only have a single product or service, there are probably many different groups of people who buy from you for many different reasons. Here’s what to do about that…
Often your home page will try to appeal to as broad a group as possible because you don’t always know what your visitor is looking for. But when you know what an individual is looking for, it’s a good idea to create “landing pages” for them. These are pages inside your web site tailored specifically to certain products you sell or even different groups that a single product caters to. These pages are called landing pages because you’ve tailored where your different customers will “land” in your web site based on their specific needs or wants.
How to use landing pages
When you have an online advertisement targeting a particular group, you want that ad to lead to a landing page that addresses that group’s needs.
Often, instead of trying to optimize your home page for a variety of different key words, it’s a good idea to create pages inside your site optimized for each of those key words.
You can “segment” your email list so you can send different emails to different groups within your email list. When you do, you can send them to specific pages on your web site meant just for them. The same goes for writing articles and creating videos and other forms of media that addresses the needs or wants of a particular segment of the population.
These pages will give you much better conversion rates than a catch-all home page that tends to be very general in nature.
Examples:
#1) One friend of mine started marketing his web site though a pay-per-click campaign. When someone typed in “mastermind group” in Google’s search engine, an ad for his site would appear. People who clicked on that ad went to his site expecting they’d find information on a mastermind group, but when they arrived at his site there was no mention of mastermind groups at all (one aspect of his business included mastermind groups, but he didn’t mention that on his home page).
My friend had created many ads but sent everyone who clicked on those ads to the same page, so when his “master mind” visitors got to his web site they found something that, as far as they could tell, was completely unrelated because “mastermind groups” were mentioned nowhere on the page.
Predictably, most people quickly left his site.
Sound like an obvious blunder? I’ve seen it way too many times, and if you’ve ever clicked your “back” button because you couldn’t find what you were looking for then you’ve seen it too.
#2) I run a web site that teaches people how to invest in real estate. Real estate investing appeals to a wide variety of people, but I found that college students and business owners were particularly interested. So I created two separate pages to speak directly to those audiences. Take a look:
landing page for business owners
landing page for college students
Notice that the first link takes you to http://www.realestateinvestingforbeginners.com/business_owners.php. When search engines see “real estate” and “business owners” in the web address, that tells them exactly what kind of information visitors will find on that page.
Not only do these pages written specifically for business owners and students rank higher in search engines for phrases like “real estate student” etc… but when people come to these pages and find content that is written specifically for them and their needs, these pages have a higher rate of people signing up as well.
I also own www.RealEstateInvestingForBusinessOwners.com and www.RealEstateInvestingForStudents.com and have them pointing strait to these specific pages. Search engines love descriptive web addresses like these (see How to Choose an Effective Domain Name for tips on choosing good domain names–these long domain names are good for some things and not good for others) and the “students” page brings in 20~30 visitors a month through search engines. That’s not a whole lot, but I don’t have to pay a dime for them. That’s free traffic, and it’s steadily going up!
Eventually, if I want to really capitalize on search engine traffic, I can take these web addresses and turn them into individual web sites built just for students and business owners. That’s the next step to really capitalizing on key words that bring your site traffic.
Other popular Web Site Tune-Up tutorials:
- How to Turn Nibbles into Bites
- Sure-Fire Site Improvement with Split Testing
- How to Boost Your Conversion Rates