What you need to know about landing pages all wrapped up in a checklist

What you need to know about landing pages all wrapped up in a checklist

Landing pages are nothing new when it comes to online marketing, but they can be messed up or incomplete pretty easily, which many people do.  Did you know that a properly set up landing page can increase your sales by 500% or more?  This is because the people who are coming to them actually want what you're selling or offering.  If the page is built in a way that it's specific to a certain product or service, and the traffic is looking for said service or product, the likelihood of capturing a sale is much higher than normal.

Let's say you're at the mall and you walk past a shoe store to see a nice pair of shoes on a poster that is in the window of this store.  You walk in and they don't actually carry the shoe, but they have plenty of other ones that they try to get you to buy.  Better yet, imagine if you walk into the store and their security guard stops you right away and makes you write down your name and email address before you access the shoes.  Would you be happy in either of those situations?  Well, landing pages are the same way, you need to set up your ads so they are relevant to the product you're selling and you need to let them browse freely without blocking them right away by trying to capture their email address.  I'm not saying you can't ask them to sign up for your newsletter, but I am saying to have a timer that delays the form from popping up right away.  Let them browse for 30 seconds before it pops up or only have it pop up when they go to leave your website.

You need to make a good first impression, and if you're just annoying the visitor as soon as they get to your website, they won't be sticking around for long.  If you're making a promise with your ad, saying you have something, and the person quickly figures out you don't have it or never have, they will get annoyed and leave immediately. 

If you can make your landing page feel like an extension of your ad, you will notice a lot better conversion rate and engagement on your pages.  Match your ad to the landing page and your visitors will browse for a while.  Sure, your ad doesn't have to be specific to your entire website, just make it specific to the landing page they are coming to.

Google wants to see the similar pattern as well, they want to see a sort of breadcrumbs meaning your ad needs to be relegant to the page that it is linked to.  The more relevant the ad is to the page it's linked to, the less you're pay per click (usually).  Optimizing your page will not only help you rank better in the search engines, it will lower your CPC for your keywords.

The Checklist

Have a clear business model in place
When Google and the other search engines send their spiders to come crawl your pages, they should know within a few seconds what you're entire website is all about.  You will need to set everything up so they know if you're selling a product, if you're providing loads of quality content on a blog, if you're providing a service, etc.  They also want to figure out if your website is spammy or just trying to harvest emails from the traffic they might send to you.  You should have it clean and clear what you are doing and what you'll be sending out if someone does opt into your newsletter.


You Need To Support Your Claims
Have you won any awards or gotten plenty of positive reviews?  Well you will need to link to them on a third party website in order to support your claims of being the best and everyone loving you.  Simply posting something on your website saying you've won awards and slapping some positive reviews on your pages can seem sketchy since you only edited your code and added them yourself.  I can go on my website right now and make dozens of positive reviews and add fake rewards in order to convince people I'm the best at sky diving, but I've never done it before lol.  You need to support your claims in order to have the best experience and get people to trust you.


Support Your Testimonials
Just like supporting your claims, you need to prove to Google they are legitimate.  You will likely have to put an asterik next to the review and write up a disclaimer for them, if you're not linking to them directly on a trusted third party site.  If you are running an eCommerce website, you can sign up as a trusted store through Google and have your "Trusted Store" badge on your ads and even on your pages


Have A Great Design
Second chances to make a great first impressions aren't a thing.  You need to WOW people as soon as they get to your pages, so you don't want to run your website on a free template because it will look extremely outdated and cheap.  If people think your outdated and cheap, they will go to your competition who look to be cutting edge and professional.  You will also need to have everything responsive (mobile friendly) if you want to please everyone that comes to your website.  Google actually prioritizes websites that are mobile friendly since the majority of their traffic is not coming through mobile devices.  If you have a mobile friendly website, and someone comes to it through a mobile device, it will fit to their screen and they won't have any problems navigating.  Google loves this since you're making it better for everyone they send to you, so they will send you more and more traffic over time

You can always set up a WordPress website with a premium theme from ThemeForest, just make sure you get a theme that is responsive and comes with support from the developer in case you run into a problem with any of the code or scripts.


Make Your Value Obvious
When someone lands on your website, they don't know who you are beyond your domain name.  They won't trust your right away and this means you have to convince them to take action on your website.  Before you try to pitch a service to them or ask them to sign up to your email list, you need to make your value obvious.  This could be anything from giving away free courses, free products, free content, helping them with a problem, or anything that will work to increase their trust in you.  Both your visitors and Google want to see that you're providing value before you ask the visitor to sign up for your newsletter.  You don't want to be seen as a spammy type website, so don't bombard them with popups.


Link Your Privacy Policy
You will need to make this a common practice with all of your websites.  What I like to do is link my privacy policy in the footer of my website so people can find it quickly and it's on every page of my site.  You can also add it into any forms you have on your website and make it a mandatory box that needs to be checked before the visitor can submit it.  I'm sure you've seen the check boxes that say "By checking this box you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy"


Contact Information
This is pretty standard when you set up a website, because it increases trust between you and the person viewing your pages.  It is also a requirement if you want to set up an adwords ad that will send traffic to your website.  I would suggest setting up a mailbox at the nearest UPS store because they will give you a suite number and not a P.O. box number.  This will make you look more professional since most pop up stores have P.O. boxes and you have your own suite lol


You Need Disclaimers
If you have any sort of saying, quote, testimonial, or review on your website you will need disclaimers for all of them.  You can put this disclaimer in your footer, link it on a subpage, or put it right under what someone else said about your website or service.  I'm sure you've seen something along the lines of "Individual results may vary".  Just adding something like this to your footer is usually good enough for Google and the other search engines.



In Conclusion
If you thought setting up a landing page was something that just took a few minutes and a couple nice images, you're very wrong.  It takes a lot of work to get everything optimized in a way where the search engines will love everything about you and send you plenty of traffic through their search results.  It doesn't really matter if you're targeting organic traffic or paid traffic, having a great landing page is essential if you want to be successful online.



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Thanks!

Razzy