ParkHowell.com

The Winchester Mansion is like many sprawling websites that suffer from the utter lack of a master building plan and focus

Have you ever seen the Winchester Mansion in San Jose, CA? The home, which was under construction for 38 years, is renowned for its enormous size and utter lack of any master building plan.

Does this sound like any websites you have visited?

The mansion is famous for halls and stairs that lead to nowhere. Sound familiar?

If you’re intent on continuous expansion of your website to communicate the growing services and success of your company, might I recommend building just one room at a time instead of an entire wing? And if you do it right, it will become the most visited room with the most relevant information for your visitors.

It will be the jumping off point to take the grand tour of the rest of your site.

This welcoming parlor is your landing page.

We recently learned the power of the landing page when we wanted to promote our rapidly expanding niche in sustainable marketing. Our agency website is full of successful case studies, a creative portfolio, alter ego bios of our talented staff, etc. But what it has lacked is focus that caters to the unique interests of our visitors.

So we created a single landing page that focuses on sustainability and green marketing.

Click on the image to visit the page

This new room in our site creates three competitive advantages for us

1. It aggregates our sustainable marketing programs to make them easy to find for our site visitors
2. It greatly increases the SEO of our site with a high concentration of targeted keywords in sustainability and green marketing
3. It features one of several core strengths of our agency without diminishing the other industries we work in

Josh Feig from our agency has shared the following tips on how to create your own landing page(s) to make your website less of a maze and more of a home to your site visitors.

Landing Page Basics

• A landing page is any page on your site where a user enters (read: lands on) the site
• Landing pages can be used for a variety of purposes, such as:
  • Organic search optimization
  • Sales lead gathering
  • Pay–per –click search marketing campaigns
  • Banner advertising campaigns
  • Email marketing campaigns
  • Integrated mass media advertising campaigns
  • Corporate branding
• Landing pages are most effective when used to illicit a very specific action from a user.
• One of the most important aspects of landing page optimization is the removal of elements that might distract the user from the desired action.
• Matching your searcher’s intent with a page that delivers to their expectations is key.
• Keyword research will support your landing page, but once you’ve got a visitor, it’s how you convert that visitor that will define the quality of the page.

Steps For a  Successful Landing Page

1. Research – Quality keyword research and identification of the main campaign goal will lay a solid foundation for any landing page.
2. Content – Matching the content of the page to the user’s expectation is key to user experience and fulfillment. Make sure you keep the user’s expectations in mind.
3. Design – The time span in which you have an opportunity to get the user’s attention is very short. Make a good impact with the design of the page to hold their interest.
4. Length – Keep it short and sweet, once you’ve got a user on your page and locked in, don’t offer distractions or opportunities to sway from your goal with long copy or too much content.
5. Launch – Get it up and out there. Users will respond with their actions and begin giving you insight almost immediately.
6. Testing – Watch how users respond to the page. Which search terms are they using? Where are they clicking? Are they completing the desired actions?
7. Assessment – When the campaign is over, you’ll have actionable data to improve the next round, and create an (hopefully) even more successful campaign.

Have you had success creating landing pages? What tips did we miss that you can share?