How landing pages improve SEO and increase sales

Landing pages are a great way to boost your SEO, increase sales and improve the return on investment (ROI) for your advertising spend. By linking landing pages to pay per click (PPC) advertising or specific search terms you can serve customers with exactly the information they want.

What is a landing page?

How did you get to this page? You may be one of our loyal followers, and have seen this post pop up in your RSS reader or on Twitter, but more likely you were searching for something relating to this topic, and your search engine sent you here. This blog post is, in effect, a landing page because:

• It’s the first page you’ve seen on our site
• You’ve come here looking for something specific

Landing pages need to deliver quickly, as readers aren’t browsing – they’re searching. A landing page should focus on a specific common search term or linked to advertising. As an example, an online shoe store might have an add linked to the search term ‘brown hiking boots’ and therefore create a landing page showing all of their brown hiking boots.

Capture your customer in 15 seconds or less

Studies show that 55% of internet users spend less than 15 seconds on a page they’ve clicked on. That’s barely enough time to read the headline and glance at the pictures. This is where landing pages come into play. Because landing pages are targeted at a particular audience or search term, you know exactly what to display so your page delivers what the customer is looking for before they click away.

PPC landing pages

If you shop online, you’ll recognise the experience of doing a very specific search – such as ‘0.5mm fine black felt tip pen’ or ‘size 11 brown hiking boots’ – clicking on a promising advert only to discover that the page has stripped out half the search terms (e.g. leaving ‘black pen’) or expects you to redo the search entirely. At which point, most people click away and try somewhere else: their visit has cost the site money without generating a sale.

PPC landing pages can be static pages (like this one), pages with dynamic content (for example, showing all the brown hiking boots you currently have in stock, even though that changes daily) or dynamically created pages (showing products that match the exact search term). In any of these cases, the page will only be served when the appropriate ad is shown so customers will quickly find what they’re looking for.

Landing pages improve SEO

Both humans and robots find landing pages easy to skim because they contain all the information about a particular product or service in one place. This means that landing pages can improve your SEO. Using our imaginary shoe store for another example, in a highly saturated market, many online stores will be competing for high search rankings particularly for keywords like ‘shoes’ or even ‘hiking boots’. By creating landing pages for specific popular terms like ‘brown hiking boots’, you signal that you have both shoes and brown hiking while also jumping up the rankings on these key sales areas.

Are your landing pages working?

As landing pages funnel both natural searches and advertising clicks through the same page, it makes it easy to see what the customer is looking for and whether they bought it. To continue our example, if your customers are searching for ‘brown size 8 hiking boots’ and the landing page shows hiking boots but you haven’t sold any, then you need to analyse the sales path. Is it the shopping cart broken? Are people searching for sizes you don’t stock? Is your landing page too broad (does it show all hiking boots or all outdoors shoes)? Is the item obvious on the landing page?

Fortunately, software tools make tracking the effectiveness of ppc advertising and landing pages easy. By analysing the information given, boxChilli’s marketing team can suggest improvements that can boost sales and increase the return on investment of paid advertising.

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