Hundred Dollar SEO

I haven’t written about landing pages in a while so I will cover a basic issue — the primary types of landing pages.

Stand Alone.

Most people have experienced this type of landing page. This is the type that is frequently employed by e-books and lead generation sites. All of the information is given in one location usually with only one prominent call to action. Often the navigation is non-existent, the only way out is through taking action or the back button.

Generally these are created specifically for a given campaign. For example SEObook sells a 200+ page e-book & access to tools and forums and SEOmoz sells a PRO Membership with access to tools and articles. Compare the two presentations. SEObook has a long sales letter, including images and graphs, paired with a one-time action. SEOmoz has a short high graphic presentation and testimonials that invite you to begin an extended relationship. Consider the differences between the conversions these pages are aiming for, I will cover conversion types in a later post.

Mini-Site

Many large companies use mini-sites to showcase a specific type of item or to highlight a special offering. Mini-sites are frequently 5 - 10 pages offering supporting material; echoing the call to action from the primary landing page. Often these pages will leverage the branding of the main site. In the case of made for Adsense and Affilaite mini-site there generally is no branding.

One of the positive features of mini-sites is their ability to give more information and make secondary calls to action without the user becoming distracted.

Main Site

Any page that a visitor arrives on is a landing page, even the pages in your main site. What does that mean to you? It means that you should have a clear goal for your pages. Simply ask where you want to direct the visitor to and make that the easiest exit from the page.
In some cases this can be difficult to accomplish. You likely have more than one thing that you want to offer. That is okay — just make one option very easy.

Each of these landing methods has strengths and weaknesses. You should choose based on the goal action and the channel that you are using to bring visitors in to your page. Main sites and mini-sites dominate organic search and paid advertising is apt to be any of the three. The deciding factor for what type of page you use will likely be the type of customer that you are servicing.

In my next installment I will cover customer types.

Tags:   books · conversion · landing pages · SEO3 Comments

Related Posts