DW Tips

A landing page is the first point of contact between a visitor and your website. During the first five seconds or so, a visitor decides to either stick around and explore your site or they hits the back button and keeps searching for something they like. For this reason, creating relevant landing pages is at the heart of search engine optimisation (SEO).

Any page on your site is a potential landing page, particularly if your marketing efforts are geared toward SEO, where you have little control over what page search engines choose to display in their results. In the Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising world, you have full control of where your visitors will land. Either way, your pages should always contain fresh and relevant material, to keep visitors from bouncing out (a bounce is when a site visitor leaves the site at the same page he landed). We can give you help and advice on what would work best for you.

Good Landing Pages Reduce Bounce Rates

A very relevant landing page will lower your bounce rates by providing the material your visitor is looking for and urging him to explore other pages on your site, leading to eventual conversions. The more pages viewed and the more time spent on a site, the higher the likelihood of a conversion.

Clearly, an above average landing page pays dividends in eventual sales, so how exactly does one go about creating a great landing page? Below are a handful of tried and tested tips you should consider for your landing pages:

Content

A large percentage of SEO efforts center around fresh and unique content. There is simply no better way to engage a customer while simultaneously getting better ranking from the search engines. Avoid using manufacturer's descriptions, which is exactly what most of your competitors are doing. Create your own tone for your product or service descriptions and visitors will appreciate it.

Above the fold

This term is derived from the newspaper world but in e-commerce it means, content viewable without having to scroll down the page. Many visitors that bounce out of sites never even bother to scroll down, where perhaps the information they need is located. Keep your most relevant content (including images) above the fold.

Product images

Internet visitors tend to scan text instead of thoroughly reading it, to see if the page has what they are looking for. Pictures, as we all know, are worth 1000 words. Make sure you use high quality images, above the fold and hopefully different than what your competitors are using.

Prices and shopping cart

As unlikely as it may seem, I've had to search for prices and "Add to Cart" buttons in various sites in which I've shopped. The entire shopping process, from adding products to your shopping cart to making the final payment should be as short, fool proof and painless as possible. Avoid turning off your customers by requesting unnecessary information such as dates of birth!

Well designed landing pages can be the difference between an average site and a hugely successful one. If you feel your site should be generating more business/sales, contact us and we'll be happy to analyze it and provide you with suggestions and ideas.