How Landing Pages Work and Why They’re So Important

Landing pages are powerful tools in your online marketing strategy. In fact, HubSpot found that most marketing organizations are focusing on increasing their number of landing pages and the optimization on those pages in 2020. And with the rising costs of online advertising, landing pages are enabling organizations to increase their conversion rates with hyper-focused content.

Using landing pages on your website has three main benefits:

1. Improve SEO rankings
2. Increase conversion
3. Generate leads, sales and move prospects further down the sales funnel

This brings us to an important question we get frequently. How many landing pages does your website need?

When you’re talking about crucial metrics like conversion rates, the simple answer to the question of how many landing pages your website should have is as many as possible. Here’s an in-depth look at why landing pages are such an important part of your marketing strategy.

Landing Pages Improve SEO Rankings

It’s difficult on broad website pages to focus your content on deeper, longtail keywords. When you’ve given an overview of what you do you can’t always drill down into each service or product subset all on one page. And that’s where the SEO value of a landing page comes in.

Now, if you’re creating a landing page for a short campaign, you might not want to invest the time and effort it takes to optimize it. When we talk about landing pages in this context, we’re referring to pages that will be a part of your online strategy on an ongoing basis but do not reside inside of your main menu.

Optimizing your landing pages for SEO includes 5 stages:

1. Build the page (and your website) for speed and mobile-friendliness
2. Keyword analysis
3. Landing page optimization
4. Earning backlinks
5. Review analytics and adapt the page continuously

For your landing pages to be an asset to your business, you need a well-designed, high-functioning website as the foundation. Ask your website design team to build you templates that you can drop content into for ease of ongoing landing pages.

Increased Conversion Through Landing Pages

Your website’s conversion rate is one of the most important metrics you can measure. The goal of your website is to inform your website visitors about what you do and why it matters so that you can convert them into customers.

Because landing pages are so laser-focused on a topic, they’re fantastic for conversions when used correctly. The key is to speak directly to what your customers need and motivate them to take action through strong calls to action. Here’s the step-by-step guide to increasing your landing page conversion rate.

1. Simple and compelling headings that break your content into small, easy-to-read segments.
2. Make sure your content flows and is simple to read, while also answering your target audience’s big questions and addressing the challenges they’re facing.
3. Showcase your company’s value proposition and the benefits they’ll get from your product/service.
4. Engage your audience with compelling visuals and images.
5. Compel users to take action with bold, clear, consistent calls to action.
6. Include only as many form fields as you truly need to reduce abandonment.
7. Test and retest your landing pages to learn what resonates with your audience. This might mean moving the CTA, adjusting the language or changing up your keywords as the market adapts.

Lead and Sales Generation on Ad Campaigns

Organizations that create landing pages for each service they offer set themselves up for easier ad campaigns. When you have pages targeted at a specific service or offering designed for conversion, you can execute a laser-focused ad campaign quickly and effectively.

Digital marketing tactics continue to overtake traditional marketing methods. And with that comes fierce competition and increased ad expenses. You need to get the most out of every click, and landing pages can help you do that.

Once you have landing pages that have focused copy and targeted calls to action, you can begin using them in ad campaigns. Ad campaigns also offer the opportunity to A/B test variations of your landing pages so you can further optimize them for conversion. See which version performs the best and adapt the landing page from there.

And if you can get good results from your ad campaigns, Google might reward you with improved SEO. Carefully target your ad campaigns to the keywords you optimized your landing pages for. Develop enough content on the pages so that your visitors stay for at least a minute. This will train Google that your landing pages offer the right content that your visitors are seeking so that Google ranks you well for these keywords organically.

Conclusion and Next Steps

Successful landing pages start with the ability to adapt and update your website based on your needs. Whether it’s for a short campaign or a long-term optimization tactic, landing pages are a huge asset to your online strategy.

The Design Positive team always supplies our website design clients with landing page templates. This makes them agile to watch for trends and monitor keywords so they can add new landing pages at a moment’s notice.