One of the big frustrations when doing SEO is that many website owners work hard to get traffic but miss out on business due to poor direction when the website visitor gets to the site. This is particularly the case when link building.
The reason this could a problem is that if your homepage is the page that you direct all of your traffic to then it might not be quick and easy for the visitor to find what they’re looking for, even if your website navigation is quite straightforward.
So let me explain by way of an example.
Imagine you run a specialist website that sells a small variety of antique teapots. And that each type of antique teapot has its own page on your website.
Now most hardworking website owners would build links but put their domain as the link (e.g. www.antiqueteapots.net). This sends the search engines and all visitors to the website homepage. For the most part that’s OK. But what if you’re an expert on 19th Century Dutch China teapots and you’ve written loads of stuff about it on your page ?
This page could be where you separate yourself from your competition by showing that you really know your stuff and that your expertise is second-to-none. This in turn could easily be used to establish credibility in the minds of website visitors and will eventually lead to increased sales (remember: if your website visitors think you’re the authority then they’re much more likely to trust you and then buy from you).
So, in order to get your knowledge and expertise across you should use this page as a landing page when you build links and on other marketing communications (such as emails, brochures etc).
This would enable you to pitch yourself as the expert right from the very start, thus making it easier for the website visitor to trust you. And you would do this by using the address www.antiqueteapots.net/19thcenturydutchteapots as your link address when building links and promoting your website.
There is, however, another angle:
Some web promoters use a separate website (often just a single page) as a landing page when promoting specific items. This is sometimes called a micro-site or squeeze page. The main benefit of this is that you can really go to town on narrowing down on the specific item that your trying to promote or sell. You can focus on just one thing.
Further to this you can use a domain which is specific to the product/service (eg www.19thcenturydutchteapots.com) which will further help with SEO.
This can be a very quick and cheap thing to set up since domains cost less than a tenner and hosting can be found for around £6 a month.
So, to summarise:
Wherever possible use a landing page for help your SEO and also to focus on specific areas of your business. Or consider using a micro-site to really narrow it down and establish credibility in the minds of website visitors.
If you’d like help with creating a landing page then give us a call on 0116 3552194.