In this article, we’re going to explore the topic of landing pages and explain why they are valuable and how they should be used.
What is a Landing Page?
A landing page is a page that is not visible in your navigation, nor linked or visible anywhere else on your site. This means that your website’s visitors will never find it, unless you were to provide them with a direct link to the page.
What are Landing Pages used for?
Landing pages are one of the most common tools used in marketing campaigns. They are widely used amongst people who do PPC (pay-per-click) advertising campaigns with Google Adwords.
Why are they Valuable?
Landing pages are valuable because they allow you to test different marketing messages, and create specific marketing messages for specific groups of customers, all at the same time. To better understand this, let me give you an example.
Let’s say your business sells shoes. However, you need to run a promotion on women’s boots and to do this you plan to send out an email blast. Well, you can set up a dedicated landing page with all the women’s boots you offer, a description of the deal you are offering, all with terminology that appeals to women — specifically for this campaign. Nobody else will see this page except those you send it to.
As stated above, landing pages are widely used in PPC campaigns. If you plan to buy advertising with Google Adwords, the absolute wrong strategy is to send all of the traffic directly to your home page. Studies have shown that while you’ll get a few visits here and there, you will waste a ton of money on a lot of clicks and will probably end up abandoning web advertising altogether. This is because if you are advertising for the keyword “women’s boots”, people expect to click your link and see a page about women’s boots. When they land on your home page, or on a general women’s shoes page, and see that they are expected to start searching out where the women’s boots are — they usually just leave.
The right strategy is to setup a landing page on women’s boots and drive all the PPC traffic for this keyword to this specific landing page. When visitors land on it, they should see a big headline or offer about Women’s boots, they should see images of women’s boots, and they should have a call to action that encourages them to “shop women’s boots” or something of that nature. They should have a well placed phone number or contact form on that very page (don’t make them go further to do so), reading “Contact us Today about Women’s Boots” or something of that nature. A well designed landing page makes it look like you specialize in that field, that you are totally dedicated to it, even though it may only be a small part of your business. If you employ this strategy correctly, your PPC conversion rates will skyrocket.
But it doesn’t matter whether you do PPC campaigns or not. The lesson here is about marketing in general. If you are advertising, linking, promoting your website, or doing any other type of marketing campaigns that lead to your website, you need to be specific about what pages you are sending people to. You should always know what audience you are marketing to, and you should know exactly where you want to lead them, and you should have a specific landing page set up specifically to meet their needs. Doing so will maximize the conversion rates of every marketing strategy you employ.
Landing Pages are great for SEO
Oh yes, they surely are. We all know that adding unique content to your website is very important when it comes to improving and maintaining your search engine ranking. Well, nothing is worse than a navigation menu with dozens and dozens of pages on it, just to confuse your visitors. By creating a landing page, all of these pages won’t clog up your navigation. Then, you can link to them on other pages of your website, or add them into the footer of your website. This allows the search engines to find them. Because they are visible and reachable now, it technically means they are no longer “landing pages” — but who cares, you get the point 
How do I create a Landing Page in IconoSites?
Within your IconoSites website builder account, all you need to do is set a page to “private” in order to create a landing page. It’s that simple.
The great part about this is that you can create as many landing pages as you want, in order to try different variations that have different headlines and different messaging. This will help you find out which page performs the best, which will further improve your conversion rates and maximize the ROI of your marketing campaigns. Ultimately, your goal is to figure out the exact headlines, phrases, and messages that result in the highest ROI so that you can implement what you have learned across the rest of the pages of your website.