Landing pages are useful tools in a search marketer’s arsenal. Designed as separate yet related webpages, landing pages simplify core concepts and make it easier for your target audience to convert. However, it’s not enough to simply build a landing page and hope for the best. In order to be successful, you need to spend time refining and perfecting your landing pages to optimize them for conversions. Plus, if you create landing pages properly, you can even enjoy increased SEO benefits.
Why Landing Pages Are Important
If you don’t have a landing page as part of your inbound marketing strategy, you aren’t immediately going to fail. However, if you use pay-per-click (PPC) ads, affiliate links, or multiple different channels to drive traffic to your website, a landing page (or series of landing pages) can help you filter your traffic and increase the likelihood of user engagement.
Consider the following benefits of landing pages:
- Audience segregation. With landing pages, you can easily filter your audiences. First, you can separate portions of your audience based on their origins; for example, a potential customer who finds out about you on social media probably won’t have the same interests as one who finds you through a PPC ad. Using unique landing pages helps you cater your message to very specific sections of your audience. Plus, using an entry landing page can help you separate truly interested parties from passersby, since landing pages encourage immediate conversion.
- Increased propensity for conversion. Landing pages are short, simple, and drive people to an obvious final destination: conversion. If your landing page is designed with conversion in mind, you’ll see a much higher rate of conversion than with your traditional main website. For most businesses, more conversions mean more revenue.
- Easy A/B testing. Hosting separate landing pages also makes it easier to perform A/B tests. With two similar yet distinct profiles, you can measure the impact of each of your designs, or the influence of each of your marketing channels, and eventually determine which selection of factors work best to convert your audience.
- Objective data. Finally, landing pages give you more objective data about your audience. Your key metrics will be visitors, bounce rates, and total conversions. With those data, you’ll easily be able to measure your campaign success and your bottom-line ROI.
Now that you understand why landing pages are beneficial, you can get to work building one for your website.  Below, we’ll explore how to do it properly.
Step One: Claim a Custom URL
Once you decide to build a landing page or series of pages, you’ll first have to decide on a custom URL. You can host a landing page on your root domain, in order to get a domain authority boost, with a custom tail end to the URL such as /special-offer or /facebook-promotion. In your URL, be as descriptive as possible, but avoid the temptation to stuff it full of keywords. Doing so may increase your chances of getting penalized.
If you’re running multiple inbound campaigns, it’s a good idea to have multiple custom URLs, each named according to its source. That way, you’ll be able to easily distinguish between your different sources of leads and objectively measure which strategies are paying off the most. Just be sure to install your Google Analytics script on each of the landing pages, and set up custom goals so you can easily monitor and report on the overall progress.
Step Two: Nail the Branding
Article source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2015/01/07/how-to-build-the-perfect-landing-page-for-seo-or-ppc/