Ditch Your Homepage & Increase Your Conversion Rate

Where do you send your advertising, email, or social media traffic?

If like many other companies you send the majority of your visitors to your homepage, you could be dramatically losing out on conversions.

Too many companies see the value in attracting visitors but forget about the sales aspect. The whole point of your website is to sell your products or services, isn't it?

It takes a lot of hard work, time and effort to attract visitors to your site, and the next biggest struggle is to get them to convert into leads for your company. What you may not realise is that directing your traffic to a targeted landing page can be one of the easiest and most effective ways to do exactly that.

The graph below is from the Marketing Benchmarks from 7,000 Businesses report. It shows companies who have increased the number of landing pages from 10 to 15 experienced a 55% increase in leads, and as the number of landing pages go up, so does the number of leads.

The trend remains the same for companies of any size. It's hard to ignore the correlation between the amount of landing pages these companies have and a growth in lead generation.

What is a landing page?

A landing page is the page a visitor lands on after clicking on an ad or a link to your website. When they arrive on your site, you only have few seconds to engage them with your content - or they may decide it is not relevant to what they were searching for and move on. The first thing they see on that page, in the first few seconds of landing on it, can make all the difference.

A landing page is not a home page, or any general page on which your visitors might land. The key difference is that a landing page has one specific goal to achieve ‐ such as to sign-up to your newsletter, to download content, or to complete a transaction.

Each landing page will target a different audience or offer which you create. There could be a specific landing page for traffic generated from an email marketing campaign, or traffic from a pay-per-click ad promoting your latest deal. Ask What do I want visitors to do once they've clicked on the link? Maybe you want them to click through to the next page? Or maybe you want to capture some data, such as name and email address from the user.

Your landing page should make it as easy as possible for your visitors to do just that. Everything on that page should be optimised to achieve that one goal, with minimal distractions.

Why do you need them?

If you send your visitors to a targeted landing page, you are directing them exactly where they need to go to get the information they want, therefore they are more likely to complete the action you wish them to take. Although your homepage may be great, filled with awesome content and exciting examples of your work ‐ it can distract visitors from completing that goal.

This type of strategy enables you to target your audience and engage them a lot better. They quickly receive the information they're looking for, resulting in a better chance of converting them into customers.

A good landing page requires one clear goal, some form of value for your visitors (a reason for them to complete the goal) and a call to action that's visually obvious. Once you've successfully set them up, it's important to monitor your analytics to see if visitors are converting or not.

They're critical for SEO

Landing pages are often associated with AdWords, where your landing page is based on a specific campaign or keyword however, it is just as important for SEO. What page does Google rank for you for a given keyword? Does that page have a call to action? Is that page the most relevant and up to date? What can be done to improve that page for conversions?

If you do not want that particular page ranking for that keyword, you will need to adjust your SEO to rank a preferred page ahead of it. We call these Preferred Landing Pages (PLPs) and over time these pages can take over as highest ranking page for your website. If your ranking report only gives you keyword data (i.e. you rank #5 for keyword X), rather than telling you the actual URL that's ranking for you, you're missing out on valuable information. You do not need to pore over reports to find this information, but you do need to know your SEO Company has the ability and technology to track it for you.

Summary

Authentic Digital have vast experience with what works and what doesn't on landing pages. Impact words, calls to action, colours that convert, form optimisation and so on are just some of the things that require ongoing optimisation to get it just right. One tweak could be the difference between a 1% conversion rate and a 2% conversion rate (that's double your sales).

For specialist advice about maximising the use of your website with Landing Pages, call one of our team today.