Landing pages; you may or may not be familiar with them. Landing pages or “lead capture pages” are web pages specifically built around keywords and a single theme or message. When created properly, they are the first page a user sees after clicking on a Google search result or a web advertisement for a particular search term. Landing pages are designed with a clear and concise message that will help with:

A) Generating prospects and helping turn those prospects into leads.

B) Encouraging a transaction such as the sale of an item or service.

Landing pages are very beneficial to companies looking to sell products or services on the internet.  We use landing pages as a tool to help sell our services and to gain new leads.

Consider this example. Our company offers three community based web software packages under our brand SwiftCommunity. We initially had a single web page presenting a small amount of information on each product. This was a poor decision for two reasons:

  • Poor Search Engine Optimization(SEO) value - too many ideas were presented on this one page. If a prospect was searching for one particular SwiftCommunity tool, they had to find their way through all the other "noise" on the page. So did Google's search engines.
  • Poor presentation of the features and benefits for each product. The original web page, due to space concerns, could not provide a complete and clear message of what each product was or the benfits each could provide our customer. 

To fix this problem, I was tasked with developing and designing landing pages for each of the three SwiftCommunity products, SwiftDirectory, SwiftCalendar and SwiftCareers. Each landing page was built around keywords appropriate to that particular product, in hopes of generating not just more web traffic but more relevent web traffic - traffic that we hope will lead to sales. Just click on any of these product names to see the results.

How can we successfully generate potential leads if we make it too hard for prospects to find our products? How will prospects know if our tools are right for them if they can't understand the benefits our software offers? Users who landed on our old web page would be quick to leave, to find an alternative software package that talks directly to their needs.

As we found out ourselves, the answer is through properly designed landing pages for each product or service. Remember, we want to generate relevant traffic, not just more traffic. We can help accomplish this by including keywords on each landing page or through proper advertisement placement in Google search results  What steps did we take to discover the proper keywords?

Using Google’s AdWords keyword tool I entered a word or phrase that I thought people were using to search for products like ours. The keyword tool then displays relevant keywords and phrases similar to the one I used. Information on the average pay per click competition, global monthly searches and local monthly searches was all available. The keyword tool can be very powerful if used correctly.

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool

As you can see from the screenshot, “web calendar” returns 74,000 Global Monthly Searches (GMS), “web calendar software” returns 1,900 GMS, and “free web calendar” returns 5,400 GMS. Our calendar software is not for free, so using keywords to position it as a free web calendar would not only be be pointless but frustrate any web visitor who went to our site based on that term. Our best results are web calendar and web calendar software. Note that web calendar returns a much higher GMS over web calendar software, and web calendar software has a much higher competition rate (more people are buying Google ads targted to this phrase). This is a good starting point for our strategic analysis; from here more time will go into researching other relevant keywords. Eventually we can make decisions on which words to focus on.

This is Part One of a two part blog post. In Part Two I will talk about the thought process of designing content for the landing pages, so that after our relevent traffic lands on the page, we provide a clear message that describes our software, keeps the user on the page and generates a new lead or sale.