Jonathan Mendez runs multi-variate testing and finds that, contrary to common belief, having navigation on landing pages increases conversions. He found it particularly important in financial lead generation pages where having nav elements increased the comfort factor for visitors.
Fascinating stuff (do I have a boring life or what!). Seriously.
Here’s ten more really interesting, tested observations on site design and SEO.
A not so brief brief digression regarding landing pages. For those who are not familiar with them, landing pages are pages designed to serve as the place where a person who clicks on an ad or offer ‘lands’. i.e. the page they directly navigate to via the click. This almost never should be a web site home page, in fact it should almost never be an actual web site page at all. BTW, by ‘web site page’ I mean a page that is a part of a site including that site’s architecture and navigation.
To many this may seem illogical- after all aren’t I paying for advertising to get people to my site? Don’t I want the visitor to learn all about my company, to know we’re a real business, to hear about how wonderful our products and services are?
The answer is no or not really. Let’s be that visitor for a second. Suppose I’m looking for something specific like ‘translation services in Rochester, NY’ . This is a keyword string that gets analyzed for intent by the search engine which returns organic results and PPC ads that it thinks most closely match the keywords.
Now imagine that the top ad was written by a savvy search marketer and it includes the phrases ‘translation services’ and ‘Rochester, NY’. Great, thinks our searcher, that’s just what I want and she clicks. Depending on the savvy of our marketer one of two things happens:
In the first instance the home page isn’t selling translation, it’s selling a variety of language services that includes translation services. For the purposes of a web site, this page is fine- it gives a general overview of the company. For the purposes of our visitor, it is a roadblock in that it requires her to parse the page to find another link to get her closer to translation services. Given average bounce rates (percentage of visitors who leave the page within ten seconds of arriving) of 60%, you’re going to lose at least 6 out of 10 visitors right away because of this roadblock- and you paid for those clicks. In fact you’re going to lose nearly 100% of your visitors because eyetracking studies show us that most visitors rapidly skim headlines and if they don’t find what they want, poof!- they’re gone.
With a landing page your goal is simple: to capture the attention and satisfy their needs. We know her intent- she needs translation services and prefers a company in Rochester. All we want our landing page to accomplish is to assure her that we offer these two things and show her exactly how to get them with the least amount of hassle. So we start with a nice big headline:
Translation Services, Rochester, NY
That’s right, the keyword string is the headline. And yes, you are going to create individual landing pages for every keyword string. Creating this kind of page couldn’t be easier and server space is fantastically cheap so don’t complain, just do it.
Then you write copy, in bullet list form, delineating your translation services. This is a place to qualify the customer. If you don’t do small projects, tell them your focus is on larger projects. If you don’t sell retail, only wholesale, say so. If you’re nice point them to another resource (nicey-nice is good karma. They might come back with a bigger job or order). Keep your bullet list succinct and focused on benefits rather than features. If you don’t know the difference, read a bullet, pretend you’re a customer and ask yourself if you care. If you don’t, it’s not a benefit.
Once you’ve told them what you offer, tell them very clearly how to Contact you. Let me emphasize something here: keep it simple and make sure they reach a live human if they dial your number and/or get a quick response if they email. With email, use an autoresponder to verify that you’ve received their request and that a person will be responding within x number of hours. Do the same if they get directed to voicemail. Ideally you have a number dedicated to this campaign so they don’t get a company directory- remember they don’t know who they’re calling (of course you could tell them the name and direct them to that person’s inbox/VM- even better).
Here’s a very serious sales tip: Qualified leads are ripe fruit- which means they get more and more rotten by the minute. Each half day, by some estimates, that you don’t respond to a lead cuts the value of that lead by 50%! So squeeze that fruit right now while its nice and juicy…
The only other thing you’re going to put on this page is a small link that says: Visit Our Website.
That’s it, that’s your landing page.
So why are we doing this? Because the sole purpose of most search marketing is to generate a qualified lead (if you don’t sell retail, you don’t want a retail customer) and convert that lead to a customer. Anything that gets in the way cuts down on the likelihood of getting to a conversion, so do things for a reason, not because we are in love with our home page.
Here are six more great tips for creating landing pages that convert.
For domainers, if you get this far, parked pages are basically crappy landing pages. You could build your own and make them a lot more relevant by following some of this advice. Won’t work for every domain but…
I signed up for this service from Voxant. You can go in, search through news stories by subject, choose a story and they give you code to embed the story in your site. The code creates a story box and has a related banner ad. The source of the story gets 40%, they get 40% and we get 20% of ad revenue, not a great deal but hey, I’m playing around here!
They don’t care about how much traffic you have which differentiates them from the other big ad servers. Their theory (which the domain world should love) is that while the big sites comprise 50% of overall web traffic, the little guys make up all the rest and, as such, represent untapped potential for advertisers.
I tried embedding one on Burner Trouble, my climate blog. Unfortunately they’ve made a critical error in the size of the units- their smallest width of story plus ad is over 600 pixels wide which means it won’t fit in the default text area for many blog templates. I wrote them a note about it.
I like the idea of grabbing free licensed content if they (or we) can fix this…
Here’s another issue. The story was about water shortages but the ad was for Cadillacs! These two do not go together!
Frank Schilling has a great piece on a long time domainer who understands where this whole thing is going. It’s worth the read just to see his sites which blow away the average parked page.
The fascinating thing about this piece is how it demonstrates how primitive and early stage the entire domaining market is. Putting up simple, well-designed affiliate sites on domains puts someone five years ahead of the rest? Frank is a very successful domain entrepreneur so I respect his POV but this is ridiculous- If people are making millions just parking thousands of longtail domains and trading, imagine what the untapped potential is?
Prediction: Some big money is going to come in and back someone with a vision and change the whole model. The challenge is manufacturing highly relevant content and matching it to relevant domains. Parking companies try to automate this but just end up with generic content based on primitive keyword matching. On the other end we have things like blog networks who are figuring out the content generation side but don’t understand business strategy. The people who match these two things and add in a strong monetization strategy that is highly relevant to the domain subject will be the leaders.
This is why our business has a founder who understands SEO, SEM, design and programming and a founder who is a writer/producer with strategic marketing skills. You need both to move beyond what will soon be laughably primitive models like the current parking systems. It will be a lot more work but the values will be exponentially higher.