When visitors enter your website, they don’t always start on the home page. Inbound marketing and organic search results can land visitors on any interior page with no idea what to do next. Essentially, landing pages are the new home pages. Here is how to take advantage and raise conversion rates.
Home Pages and Landing Pages
Search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing don’t just feature home pages in search results. When pages other than your home page are optimized, you can achieve multiple search results and push competitors’ pages lower in rank. Your website could dominate the top of the SERPs (search engine result pages) with some fine-tuning of inner pages.
Fewer Clicks Means More Conversions
Another good reason to optimize landing pages is to help visitors find what they are looking for more quickly. Marketing 101 says the fewer times users have to click, the more likely they are to convert. Inbound marketing campaigns that are linked directly to relevant landing pages allow visitors to skip the home page and go directly to the page they really wanted, and that means one less click. To fully take advantage of the effect, every landing page needs to act like a home page.
Help Users Relax and Do Business
Try to imagine your website as a bricks-and-mortar building. Your home page is the main entrance where shoppers can orient themselves and get a broad overview of the place. Customers who enter your site somewhere other than the home page need information to feel at home. When every page performs like a mini-home page, visitors feel more relaxed and ready to do business.
Elements of a Great Landing Page
Add the following elements to create landing pages that act like home pages:
- Consistent Branding – Put your company logo on every page of the site, and keep style, design and layout consistent across the site.
- Contact Information – Provide a way for users to contact you on every page.
- Breadcrumbs – A breadcrumb trail shows users where they are on the site at all times.
- Call to Action – Each page needs to tell visitors what to do next. Examples are, “Sign up for our free newsletter,” “Visit our photo gallery,” or “Buy Now.”
- On-site Search Box – Users are more likely to look around if they can search on site.
Conclusion
If landing pages are the new home pages, you can leverage the situation by making every page a welcome center.
Featured image license: Creative Commons image source Juan Iraola on Flickr
