In this episode of Actionable Marketing In Minutes we discuss landing pages and how you should view your internal pages as individual landing pages.
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Problem:
Here’s something to think about…..when you drive traffic to your website via organic efforts, the page that visitor lands on is essentially a landing page. I am going to guess that like most businesses you just considered them a page within your site that held relevant information about the search topic. But it makes sense to shift your thinking and really consider your internal pages to be landing pages, doesn’t it? After all, your traffic is landing on that page from an external website or Search Engine; but not many people treat them like goal converting pages.
When we think of landing pages we usually think of them as being used in paid advertising or in email marketing. I recently read somewhere that landing pages are the last thing considered when developing a paid advertising or email marketing campaign. If that’s true, and I have no reason to doubt the source, it’s no surprise that most businesses put little to no consideration into the organic search landing pages.
Consider this… if you do any form of search engine optimization, every page on your site is a landing page. When a user clicks through to your site from an organic link on a search engine, they are not going to a hidden landing page. They are going to a page indexed on your site. So, what can we do to our internal pages so that they act more like a landing page?
Solution:
When you shift your mindset, it becomes true that landing pages are just as important for organic efforts as they are for paid. Most marketers think that it’s the job of the ad or the meta description in organic search to do the heavy lifting and convince the target market to respond. I would argue that that’s not entirely true. The ad’s job is to spark an impulsive action… to click. The landing page’s job is to get the target to take action. To do something that they inherently don’t want to do. Whether it’s to read (yuck), fill out a form (laborious), or enter a phone number (yikes, who knows who will call). The landing page has a pretty hefty responsibility. But if you don’t treat your internal pages like landing pages, you’re setting them up for failure.
Here are 3 things you can do to your organic landing pages today:
* Offer conversion options on every page
Optimize your pages by offering an eBook, newsletter signup, coupon, something, anything that entices the target market to take action on virtually every page on your site.
* Hot links
Chances are petty good that a shopper who came to your site from an organic search is primed and ready to take action. Make sure that there is enough relevant information available to them to click through to. The more information they can garner from your site, the more questions you can answer for them easier and quickly, the more like they are to stay on your site and / or take action.
* Test
More PPC landing pages are tested for optimization than organic search landing pages. Understandably so because when you pay for something you want to make sure you get the most from it. Therefore, paid
advertising landing pages are more commonly tested and optimized. On the flip side, when your internal pages are not fully optimized and tested, you’re leaving money on the table. Just because organic traffic is free doesn’t mean it’s invaluable.
Benefits:
When you start treating your internal pages like landing pages you start to look at everything differently. The page layout, the content on the page, and so on. I hope this episode got you thinking. For more on how to do this reach out to us and we will be happy to help you get the most return on your internal landing pages.
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