Making Sense of Keywords, Landing Pages, Calls-to-Action, Third-Party Validations and Conversion Techniques
In our GeekCoaches post on On-Site Search Engine Optimization, we covered the importance of matching your website’s content to the queries used by your prospective customers on search engines. In that article, we discussed an example of not highlighting our Mississauga location because we serve clients around the world. As you can imagine though, we are quite happy to go after local clients — that is, as long as it does not make us look like a local-only company. The answer for this is a lead generation and conversion tool called Landing Pages.
Landing Pages
Landing pages, by their most basic definition, are simply the pages that someone first lands on when they visit your site. People can land on your site by one of four means:
- By directly typing your URL into a browser — typically your homepage.
- By clicking on a link to your site that either you or a third-party placed on another site. (We don’t include advertising or search links here.)
- By conducting a search and clicking on a search engine listing.
- By clicking on a link in an advertisement you created.
A landing page can be any page on your site including your homepage, your blog posts and your contact page. In fact, your homepage may not be your most popular landing page. If I wrote a blog post titled, ‘Five Reasons Apple Devices Suck’, that page might very easily get the most visits on my site because of the popularity of Apple.
Stand-Alone Landing Pages
Going back to the challenge of promoting our Mississauga roots while still appealing to a worldwide audience, the solution is to create a stand-alone landing page. A stand-alone landing page is still on our site and it can even contain links to elsewhere on our site. However, our stand-alone landing pages cannot be obviously accessed from the site — that is they are not included in main menu links on our main site-pages. You can only find these landing pages by search, an ad or by knowing the URL (or in less prominent links). In this way, we can create a page that highlights our being in Mississauga, a page that highlights being in the Greater Toronto Area and other pages that highlight our being near other towns close by. Without people browsing several pages that are all very similar.
Keywords and Landing Pages
When creating specialized, search-oriented landing pages, it is important to have an understanding of what the popular search terms are related to your topic. For example, ‘web development toronto‘ gets an average of 170 searches a month in our area, but ‘web design toronto‘ gets 1,900 searches a month. While it is safe to assume that search engines understand there is a relationship between development and design, a quick search on Google will show you that a search for ‘web design‘ favours sites using design while a search for ‘web development‘ favours those using development. Many ad listings work the same way. At GeekCoaches, we favour ‘development‘ as more accurately reflecting what we do, but we use ‘design‘ because many of our customers do not make the distinction, and it is the more popular search term. Regardless of what we choose though we can create at least one landing page that uses the other term. We choose to use landing pages rather than trying to incorporate every popular variation in a single page because each page should only target one keyword to maximize your ranking for that word.
Designing Landing Pages
Because a search-focussed landing page will only be seen by those people searching for a particular term, you can create multiple pages with the same design where only certain words change from page-to-page. By definition, a landing page is the first page a potential customer hits on your site. As such, it is important that your landing pages provide some background — to your organization and to what you are promoting. Search-focussed landing pages need enough content to be well indexed by search engines, but they should also present bite-sized information and bold visuals much like a magazine ad. Finally, a landing page should have a clear call-to-action that is repeated two or three times on the page.
“Companies with an active landing page strategy generate 12 times more leads than those businesses with a limited approach.” – HubSpot
Building Trust Through Testimonials and Third-Party Validation
Key elements of a successful landing page (or other web content) are testimonials and third-party validations. Testimonials are straightforward — short, punchy recommendations and positive reviews from former and current clients. Third-party validations are quotes from authority sources that back-up the points you make on your landing page. For example, when Google says it is important to have well-designed landing pages, that strengthens the rationale for hiring GeekCoaches to help you.
Calls-to-Action
A call-to-action is a request to a web-page visitor to perform a particular task (course of action). They are the ultimate reason for having landing pages — to get people to act. Typically, there are four calls-to-action that a business site can make of people going from most direct to most indirect:
- Buy something immediately.
- Contact you by written message, phone or personal visit.
- Provide contact information so you can contact them.
- Read or view something further as part of convincing someone to become a customer.
An example of a call-to-action to secure an email address would be, “Sign-up now for a free consultation:’ together with an email address form. Usually, call-to-action text and graphics are big and attention grabbing.
Creating Urgency for Greater Conversion
A conversion occurs when you get a site visitor to take action on your site. A key conversion tactic for landing pages is to create urgency with your site visitors. Urgency can be created by any of the following:
- Using urgency words like ‘today’ or ‘now’.
- Offering a time-limited discount (or bonus with purchase).
- Providing a free-item that visitors are eager to receive such as an e-book.
GeekCoaches Landing Pages
GeekCoaches can develop all aspects of effective landing pages for you. By employing landing pages with good design, strong customer and third-party validation, clear calls-to-action and conversion urgency — we help you attract more pageviews, generate more leads and convert more leads into customers. So, here’s our (not so bold) call-to-action — Contact Us Today!
I would like to meet yr sales team to build up this product and how to create a client strategy through u guys. Please call me on 647 995 4159
regards,
George