Building landing pages on your company’s website is one of the most effective and directly impactful actions you can take in marketing. It means chaining your philosophy about what your site can do for your business, and lets you use all of the experience you’ve gained operating a successful business and apply that to your online presence.
Building landing pages on your company’s website is one of the most effective and directly impactful actions you can take in marketing. It means chaining your philosophy about what your site can do for your business, and lets you use all of the experience you’ve gained operating a successful business and apply that to your online presence.
The terms “landing page” and “home page” are used a lot, sometimes as synonyms. The definition of a landing page is vague, and can mean a few different things. Ultimately creating a landing page on your company website means you’re intending the visitor to land on a page that creates a specific purpose— leading them to working with you, and becoming a customer.
What is a landing page?
As we stated earlier, a landing page is any individual page on a website where a visitor lands after clicking on a link, or finding your website via search. Traffic can come to a landing page from either organic search results, ad clicks, from a social media website, or a combination of those.
Luc Durand of Ranking Academy explains this well in a video about increasing your landing page conversion rates. While there are plenty of examples of landing pages and the marketing philosophies that go into them, what Luc says is correct— if a visitor is clicking something and lands on your webpage, then it’s a landing page… and you should market it as such.
Depending on the type of company you are, what product or services you sell, and the specific offer you’re making a webpage about, there are styles and approaches that can best suit your needs.
In general, there aren’t too many wrong approaches to creating a landing page as long as you follow a few important steps. Above all, your landing page should be clear, focused, and it must give your visitor every tool necessary to make an informed decision on buying your product (or hiring your company for a service).
What goes into a landing page?
There are some useful landing page best practices from a wide range of creditable online marketing resources. Naturally each list of “must haves” is tailored to a specific type of style or aesthetic.
Some professional marketers will insist on zero navigation, not allowing the visitor to click on anything that isn’t a CTA (call-to-action) to the specific offering the webpage is about. While clear and direct, some other marketers believe including further resources, primary navigation, and other links are helpful in establishing authenticity and giving the visitor more incentive to placing an order or a call.
Each of these has merits, and as long as the landing page is clear it should be easy to choose the style that best benefits your business.
The COVID-19 Supplies from Stop-Painting.com is an example of a landing page with great SEO, a design the presents important products and information, while retaining the full-site navigation.
The page includes some copy that introduces the business need for pandemic response signage, includes multiple appropriate keywords, alt text on every product image, while retaining the sub-category and primary site navigation.
It’s clear they’ve decided on a style that directly presents what the visitor is searching for, while also giving them the option to purchase and browse related business products from other categories. Since their buyer persona of business operators will need signage and related products besides pandemic and safety response, opening up the navigation is a sound idea.
This example from software automation workspace SaaS company Qase is a sleek landing page that prefers rich content, lots of white space, and deep information.
The Qase landing page includes screenshots of the software, large bold headings, logo walls from noteworthy clients, and a number of detailed reviews that cite the product benefits.
All of the bullet points, reviews, features, and copy is separate from images— so it can all be crawled by search engines. The mini-site or landing page includes a few links besides the primary CTA of a free trial, giving the user additional access to pricing breakdowns and features.
The only thing missing from the landing page is a video. That brings us to our landing page checklist:
- Bold and Focused Headlines
- Impactful Images that Describe the Offer
- Compelling Copy
- Clear Calls to Action
- Optimized for Search
- Include Key Features in Bullet Points
- Showcase Reviews & Testimonials
