What’s on a landing page? First of all, it is a very good marketing tool if done correctly. But what is the structure of a landing page and how is it used in the advertising process? “
Landing page purpose
The basic purpose of a landing page in online marketing is to motivate, inform, persuade, and sell the product or service to the visitor who landed on your well-designed page. That sounds pretty good.
To start building your landing page, you need to consider the page structure, your words, and your keywords in the total combination. If you do it right, you will get sales, or convince someone to fill out a form or survey, etc. I’m sure you understand what I mean.
Structure of a landing page
When a visitor clicks on your landing page, they should see the following structure.
Headline
The owner must do three important things:
Capture the visitor’s attention
Declare the purpose of the page
Congratulations and match your banner or ad
You only have a moment to grab the visitor’s attention, therefore the title should entice the reader to move on to the next paragraph or subtitle. So pick your words, font style (Arial, Verdana are good choices), font size to your advantage.
And remember, if the headline doesn’t complement or match your banner or ad, they, your target market, will disappear.
Body structure
The body should consist of the following:
1) Paragraphs: paragraphs should be short with blank spaces. Why? Most people will visit a site, but will not read it word for word. So what do they do? They scan the page. Which brings me to the next important part of a landing page: the sentences.
2) Sentences – First, the sentences should be short, fast, also the period and without words of twenty dollars. You must assume that the scanners are in a hurry; they want the information as fast as you can get it without putting them to sleep and without having to get out a dictionary.
Second, the first sentence of each paragraph should contain the summary of the paragraph. “A call to action” (Buy it now! Try it now!) Should appear throughout the body of your copy, as well as at the top and bottom of your page.
Bold Captions: Bold captions should identify the subject of the paragraph or paragraphs that rest under the caption. This will allow the skimmer to read or skip the paragraph, looking for the information that interests you the most.
3) Bulleted Information: Bulleted information is a lifesaver. Bullets help to condense your copy into short, complete and easy-to-read sentences without being boring. Use them, use them.
According to Eyetrack III Research, a smaller typeface encourages more focused reading, while a larger type encourages scanning. With that little bit of information, you may want to experiment with the font size in the body of your copy.
As you can see from the body structure, we are looking for a tight copy page with well defined bold captions and bulleted information, to make it easy for the scanner / reader through the copy without having to click.
Things to consider
· Place the most important information at the top of the fold.
· Avoid distracting material on the side bars. If the information in the sidebars distracts the visitor, the focus is lost and that could mean a lost sale.
· Add images or a form if relevant, but be careful about the size.
Keywords and SEO
As with any other web page on your site, keywords are important. Your landing page content needs to be keyword rich, but not cluttered with keywords, for search engines and your targeted traffic to find you.
Once your content is complete, you need to make sure that you optimize your landing page for search engines. Images must have an alternate tag description. Try to describe your images with specific descriptions. Example: if you have a picture of a Schnauzer, write ‘alt = Schnauzer’, not ‘alt = “dog”‘. Look for the specific description, not the generic one. Why? When you do a search, would you look for a dog or a Schnauzer? In most cases, I would bet on the Schnauzer.
PPC, SEO and Keywords
If you are writing your landing page for a Google ad (PPC advertising), again, make sure your landing page is relevant to your keywords and your ad copy. There are two reasons to heed this tip: 1) Your traffic will click and go elsewhere to find the information they are looking for; 2) Google will penalize you.
You should also optimize your landing page for whatever searches people make through search engines. Yet another avenue to quality traffic. However, if you must use multiple landing pages for the same product, with only slight wording variations, it would be wise to index only the general landing page and have your robots meta tag include a “NOFOLLOW” so they are not indexed. this will prevent search engines from incurring duplicate copy penalties.
New Google AdWords algorithm for landing pages
Google now assigns quality scores to landing pages to determine rankings, prices, and other factors. A recent change in Google’s algorithm for landing pages affected many established websites. This change caused difficulties for some, for others it closed its business.
So if you don’t want to be penalized with higher bid prices for your keywords, or a change in your ad page ranking, you should consider the following information when developing a landing page.
1) Relevant content
2) Links to the page that provide relevant and accurate information related to the ad.
3) Your landing page must be at least 500 words (which is not much).
4) Remove all AdSense ads on your landing page.
Testing your landing page
Testing your landing page is important. You will need to continually modify your copy until you are comfortable with the copy and are providing the results you want.
To conclude, landing pages can be your best friend or your worst enemy. Design it right, follow the rules, and it will be your successful friend for life.