What is a landing page?

A landing page is a page on your website that appears when a potential customer clicks on a link in a search engine (this can either be a sponsored or natural search listing), advertisement (e.g. a banner ad from another website) or from a link in an email.

Natural Search

From a search engine optimisation perspective (this is to get your site to appear in natural search results), content on a landing page revolves around a particular keyword/phrase (or a combination of keywords) that may be used by a potential customer when utilising a search engine. The idea is that when search engines crawl your site, they find a page that is rich in this particular keyword/phrase  and also provides great information around this keyword / phrase, and hopefully will rank this page high in the search results.

For example if your site was selling kitchen appliances, you could create a landing page for each of the following terms:

• Cook tops
• Ovens
• Gas Appliances
• Whitegoods

This is far more effective than trying to optimise a single home page with numerous keywords.

Sponsored Search / Banner Ads

Landing pages for Sponsored Search and Banner Ads are quite important. When a user clicks on your ad, you need to take them directly to the page that contains information that is relevant to your ad.

So using the example above, if you were doing a sponsored search on the same keywords, you could create a landing page that shows information relevant to cook tops (assuming the ad was in relation to cook tops).

Usually these landing pages have a call to action, which encourages the user to purchase the product, lodge an enquiry or subscribe for further marketing information.

Tracking

Adding tracking to landing pages is very important if you are paying for each click through (for sponsored search or banner advertising).

If you have a banner running on two different sites, you can track how many clicks you are getting from each site. If site A is generating more click throughs than Site B, you can target your marketing budget more effectively.

You can also track conversions, i.e. if 100 users click on a banner ad, how many of them actually purchase a product, lodge an enquiry or subscribe to your database.