K.I.S.S.

Landing pages – the places on your site where people land after clicking on one of your sites links in the search engines – are often your first formal introduction to a new visitor to your website.  Landing pages can also have a huge impact on where you show up in natural and sponsored results on search engines like Google, Yahoo! Search, and Microsoft Live Search.

Landing pages can include your site’s homepage, but are usually pages within your website that are created specifically for people who click on links for your site that appear in sponsored or natural search results, and pertain to a specific offer, promotion or campaign.

Here at Yield Software, we often hear from our small and medium size business clients that they want better landing pages, but just don’t know what they can do given limited time and resources.  So, in an effort to be helpful, I’ve come up with a short list of six recommendations that will enable you to create simple, easy-to-implement landing pages for your small or growing business.

Step One: Ask the question “Who am I / what is my business?” One of the major mistakes small businesses make is that it is not crystal clear what product or service they provide.  These folks cloud their offerings in fancy acronyms meaningful to their employees but not their prospects.  Or they are overly general, saying things like “Leading provider of value added solutions.”  Find clarity about who you are and work on describing what you offer in the clearest language possible.  Avoid jargon, “inside the beltway” chatter and acronyms not universally known or understood.

Step Two: Establish the goal for your landing page. Are you trying to generate sales? Do you want to increase the uptake of a free trial?  Or is your landing page a lead generation tool?  Be sure you’re clear what you want from your landing page.  According to statistics, you only have about three seconds before the visitor hits the “back” button.  Having a clear goal will ensure you make the most of those precious seconds.

Step Three: Reinforce your keywords. If you don’t already have a keyword list – that is, a list of words or phrases people might naturally type into a search engine that most closely pertain to your own goods or services – make one now.  Make sure that the keywords you bid on are contained in your PPC ads and also in your natural search engine listings.  Then, be sure your keywords are naturally incorporated into the headlines and body copy of your landing page.  In other words, don’t just stuff a bunch of keywords randomly on the page – it’s got to make sense to any normal person who reads it.

Step Four:  Present an obvious call-to-action. When people do a search on Google or other leading search engines, they are almost always declaring an intention.  They’re looking for something.  If that something happens to be YOUR something, it’s best to give them an immediate next step to take when they arrive on your site.  So be sure there is a clear, obvious call-to-action that helps your visitor get what they’re looking for. Be sure it’s the first thing any normal person would notice when first scanning your landing page.

Step Five: Remember the old “K.I.S.S.” lesson (keep it simple, stupid!). You’ve heard it a thousand times before so don’t forget it now: less is more.  Keep your pages uncluttered and free from too many options.  This means one or two (smallish) graphics; no more than three bullets in a list; and avoiding dense copy blocks (for instance, line spacing at 1.5 or double).  When your visitors click on your links it is likely because they are looking for something very specific.  So address that need – and that need only.  If you must present options (small, medium, large, etc.), keep the presentation of those options very basic and easy-to-understand.

Step Six: Measure as much as you can. You can use free tools such as Google Analytics on your site to measure all sorts of user behaviors while folks are visiting your site.  You can also look at how many people click on your links, how many hit the “back” button, how many heed your call-to-action, and how many of those convert to a sale.  Why is this important?  This is information you can use to make your landing pages better and better over time.

More sophisticated Web marketers will go to the extra effort to personalize the landing page for each individual visitor to the extent possible.  Amazon.com and several other e-tailers are masters at this, and paying attention to how they do it can be very instructive.

But there’s time to get to the harder stuff a little later on.  Landing pages don’t have to be highly designed or super-sophisticated destinations that suck all your time and resources.  But they do have to be simple, focused, efficient and effective.  Following these six easy steps can help you toward these ends.

Small Plug: I would also like you to know that our Yield Web Marketing Suite includes powerful landing page optimization (LPO) tools that, when used in concert with a pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign on the major search engines, can automatically test and optimize your landing pages so only the right pages are at work for you.  We’ve got a free 30-day trial, so there’s no cost to you to give it a try.

Go here for more information.

To see our blog post on LPO, go here.

To see our entire Web Marketing 101 blog series, go here.