Landing pages are the locations on a website where people find themselves after clicking on a link, very often from a display ad in a website or a sponsored link on a search engine result page. Landing pages can be a website homepage; a specific page within your website, such as a product page; or specially-built promotional pages on your website with tailored messages or promotions for the people landing there.

When people do searches on Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft and click on links inside the search engine results page, they’re clicking on one of two kinds of links: Sponsored or Natural (also called organic).

Landing Page Optimization (LPO) is concerned with ensuring that once someone has landed on your site, they do what you hope they will do (i.e., buy your products!).

Simply put, LPO is the process by which owners of websites improve the landing page experience to maximize the chance a visitor will either (i) extensively browse the site; (ii) return to the site for multiple visits, perhaps even bookmarking it; (iii) recommend the site to others through one of a variety of means; and / or (iv) become a paying customer of the goods or services offered on the site.

So, to summarize, most web marketers use LPO to profitably engage a visitor while keeping the sales cycle short.  The degree to which a landing page is optimized to reach these goals can often mean the difference between sales success and failure.

A first and key rule for landing page optimization is to ensure that the content of the landing page is consistent with the sponsored or natural search link copy that generated the click to your site in the first place.

For instance, say you sell organic sunflower seeds to home gardeners from your website. If a person doing a search on “world peace” clicks on a link to your website that says “Prescriptions for World Peace” and then lands on a page that says “Grow flowers and spread happiness – buy the world’s best organic sunflowers seeds here”, those visitors will likely be disappointed at not finding what they were looking for.  And they’ll immediately click off your page (which is called a “bounce”).

There are two consequences for bounces. First, if you paid for that click through a PPC campaign, you’ve lost any hope of converting those marketing dollars into revenue.  Second, the major search engines pay attention to bounce-offs.  They count them. (Heck, they count everything!)  And those bounce-offs are dings against your natural search placement on search pages.

By ensuring that your landing page is consistent with your link copy, you increase the likelihood that you’ll meet the expectations of all those who arrive on your site.  In fact, the degree to which you’re able to customize landing pages to speak directly to each individual visitor will have enormous impacts on conversion-to-sale metrics.

For instance, more sophisticated web marketers will build landing page experiences that dynamically adjust based on the information they have about the visitor.  This is called LPO targeting.  There are three types of LPO-based targeting (adapted from Wikipedia):

Passive Targeting. The content of the landing page automatically changes based on information about the visitor’s search criteria, geographic information, or other data points that can be used to effectively segment your customers.

Active Targeting. The content of the landing page automatically changes based on known information about the customer (e.g., prior purchases, demographic/psychographic/geographic information, etc.) to anticipate future purchase intentions based on predictive analytics (for instance, Amazon does this very well by looking at your past searches and purchases to suggest books or other products you might like.)

Social Targeting. The content of the landing page automatically changes by drawing upon publicly available information using a system based on reviews, ratings, tagging, referrals, etc.

Many web marketers will opt to test just a few versions of landing pages to determine which perform best – that is, to see which page coverts the highest number of visitors into paying customers.  This is called LPO experimentation.  According to Wikipedia, there are two types of LPO based on experimentation:

Closed-ended Experimentation. Consumers are exposed to several variations of landing pages while their behavior is observed. At the conclusion of the experiment, an optimal page is selected based on the outcome of the experiment.

Open-ended Experimentation. This approach is similar to closed-ended experimentation, except that the experimentation is ongoing, meaning that the landing page is adjusted dynamically as the experiment results change.

By doing this kind of experimentation, you are able to maximize the profit potential of every single new and returning visitor to your site.  By constantly optimizing – that is, by running open-ended experiments – you can ensure that landing pages are always updated to reflect the dynamics of any given moment in time, keeping landing pages fresh and relevant.

Small Plug: For most small business owners and web marketing novices, LPO can sound extremely difficult and tough to manage.  But it doesn’t have to be.  Our Yield Web Marketing Suite includes useful and easy-to-use LPO module that does the work of both closed-ended and open-ended experiments for you.  You get simple to-do lists that give you quick tasks before the system takes over the heavy lifting for you.  Because the system never sleeps, you can rest assured that only ideally-performing pages are favored over time to get you the best outcomes for your web marketing investments.

For more information on the Yield Web Marketing Suite LPO Module, go here.

To see more blog posts in our Introduction to Web Marketing Series, go here.