Phil Lauterjung

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Integrated Lead Generation – Part 5: Landing Pages

September 23rd, 2009 |

Author: Phil Lauterjung

What’s a Landing Page you ask? Well, if you have done what we’ve talked about in the previous parts of this series you will have people clicking on your listing in the organic search results and/or your pay-per-click ads. Where are they going when they click? Do they all go to your home page, or maybe to your “contact us” page? Why do you want them to go there?

Think about this for a moment. You have spent a lot of time and effort to make sure you’re using relevant keywords to attract higher rankings and click-thrus to your web site. All that visitor knows at that point is that they might be interested in your product or service. How hard do you want them to work to find out if that’s true?

If they end up on your home page they may or may not find anything relevant to the keyword(s) they used to initiate their search. They certainly won’t find anything relevant on your “contact us” page. The tendency for most web surfers at this point is to hit the back button and look for another link on the search results page. And, you just lost an opportunity.

That’s why you need landing pages. These are individual pages with content relevant to specific keywords that your prospect used to find you on the search page. Usually the heading of the landing page has the keywords in it. There is also a specific call-to-action that offers them something more in the way of information on the keyword topic. It might be a white paper, a video, a case study, or something else you have of value related to those keywords.

It’s important that your offer is NOT a sales pitch for your company. You need to position your company as a valuable resource at this point. Also, don’t ask for a lot of information from the prospect either. Just what you need to start a dialog with them. Their name and email address is usually good. You can ask for added info on subsequent visits to your site. You could also add a check box for them to sign up for your email newsletter as a way of continuing contact with them.

There are certain additional advantages to landing pages. A landing page allows you to test and make changes. This gives you the opportunity to:

Refine your message and your offer based on your results.
Test different versions of your landing page with variations in the heading, call to action, the button they push, and other elements.
Gain a better understanding for what works and what doesn’t.
Maximize conversion rates.

Conversion rates are what you ultimately want – that’s what give you leads. You are probably wondering if all this is worth the effort. Here are some basic averages that generally hold true:

Conversion rates for lead generation from a home page are between 5-6%.
Landing pages that match the theme of the keyword search are around 10%
Landing pages that match the keyword exactly are closer to 12%

I have seen test done that result in even higher rates, but that’s usually after a fair amount of testing and refinement. Here’s an example of a before and after landing page from a test done by MarketingExperiments.

Landing Page Example

The results from the changes made was nearly double the conversion rate – from 4.89% to 9.55%.

The point is this – do the math for yourself. How much is your average sale? If you could double the number of visits to your web site that turn into leads each month, how much more would that give you in sales revenue? Now consider if that’s worth the effort.

One word of caution: statistics show that only about 20-25% of those leads will actually be ready to buy when they come to your site for the first time. The key is how you deal with the other 75-80% so that they end up eventually buying from you. Stay tuned and we will address that.