A quick guide to landing pages, and why we love them

By HGB , Oct 21 2016

At HGB we get asked a lot, “what is a landing page?” We don’t mind – we love talking about them, simply because we believe they’re a powerful tool that can do so much for businesses. Read on for a quick guide to landing pages, and what they can do for your website and business.

So, what’s a landing page? You may have heard different definitions of these. A quick Google search (because let’s be honest, that’s where we all start!) will tell you a landing page is a web page which serves as the entry point for a website.

However, at HGB we prefer to think of these pages in a more value-driven way. We define landing pages as a page that has a form, and exists solely to capture a visitor’s information through that form.

Why we love landing pages

In a nutshell (we’ll explain in more detail as we go), landing pages are key to improving your marketing ROI, by driving leads and revenue.

In fact HubSpot says if you want to do one thing to improve your marketing ROI, use landing pages on your website.

Here’s how landing pages can improve your marketing ROI

1. Convert website visitors into leads

A good landing page will have an interesting offer. An offer can take many forms, for example, an e-book, guide, checklist, video, or free consultation.

Whatever your landing page offers, it will be so valuable to your buyers, they’ll be willing to fill out a form and give you some basic information to access it. And boom – you have a lead! And that lead can be nurtured with follow-up emails which serve up more useful content, until you’re ready to close the lead to a customer.

This also gives you valuable information about who is looking at your website content.

Example: Lightwire’s refer a friend landing page 

2. Improve SEO

Every time you publish a landing page, you’re adding an indexed page to your website, which improves your site SEO and drives organic search traffic to your site.

It’s important your landing page is SEO-friendly, which means you’ve optimised the title, headlines, URL, images and other parts of the page for a target keyword.

3. Get more bang for your pay-per-click-buck

Many companies send their pay-per-click advertising (PPC) to their homepage. However, you have a much higher rate of converting a website visitor to a lead if you use a targeted landing page that helps them quickly find what they’re looking for.

And you know what they’re looking for – because they’ve just entered that term into Google.

Example: Diprose Miller Xero landing page

We helped client Diprose Miller, who is a Xero platinum partner, create a Xero landing page to capture details from visitors who are interested in the software. Diprose Miller realised if people were searching for “Xero accountant Morrinsville,” they could drive this traffic to a targeted Xero landing page, rather than just their homepage. Visitors are prompted to fill out a form to receive a free Xero trial.

How much easier is that for website visitors, rather than landing on the homepage and then having to search to see if Diprose Miller can help them with Xero.

 

4.  Make life easier for your buyers

You’ve just published a new e-book, and you want to tell your buyers. So you share it on your social media channels and in your e-newsletter. You know who you’re targeting, and you know what you want them to do (download the e-book), so it makes sense to make the process as quick and easy as possible by driving traffic to a specific landing page, where they are prompted to complete the action.
If visitors are required to search through your website to find the content they’ve been promised, you will quite probably lose them.

HGB client Report It Now offer an e-book on Implementing an Ethics Reporting System. A landing page is used to tell people what they can find in the e-book, and a form collects basic info from buyers before they can download the resource.

To sum up

So, there you have it, four quick reasons why we love landing pages, and some examples from HGB clients and other businesses putting them to effective use. If you have more questions – make sure you get in touch!

If you want to know more about creating landing pages, read our blog on creating effective landing pages.