Landing Page

In the simplest model, this applies to a website which is an online shop or business. There is a main page, product pages and checkout pages. The landing page or pages are not places where people buy things or do things, but rather pages that induce people to go to other pages such as sign up or product pages or ebusiness checkout pages. 

How to Make a Landing Page Popular

The first qualification for a landing page is that it must draw visitors from elsewhere on the Web. It must be one of the entrance pages of your site. For some reason, most articles about landing pages neglect this cardinal point. They assume that the landing page will be made popular by an email campaign or advertising, or that it is the main page of the website. But advertising costs money and email marketing generally does too. Neither would fall into the category of "organic Search Engine Optimization."

A landing page is made popular by doing the same things you do for other pages, only moreso:

Good content: Put content on that page that people want to see, and the world might beat a path to your door! Sometimes the world will beat a path to pages that you don't really want to use as landing pages, and then you must utilize this traffic as best you can, and try to direct it to other parts of the Web site.

Good optimization: Optimize the page for a popular keyword or phrase related to the content.

Good site design: More than one page should link to that Web page.

Inbound links: Get others to link to that page.

What a Landing Page Does

A Landing Page can do one of the following, as Seth Godin observed: 

1. Get a visitor to click (to go to another page, on your site or someone else's).
2. Get a visitor to buy.
3. Get a visitor to give permission for you to follow up (by email, phone, etc.). This includes registration of course.
4. Get a visitor to tell a friend.
5. (and the more subtle) Get a visitor to learn something, which could even include posting a comment or giving you some sort of feedback.

I will add a sixth possible outcome:

6.  The landing page can get the visitor to take some action in the real world: be kind to someone, vote Republican, vote Democratic or carry out a terror attack.

Yes, terrorist organizations use the Web very effectively and have "landing pages."

In the case of #1, #5 and #6, "Conversion rate" cannot be measured by the number of visitors who see only one page, nor necessarily by the number of visitors who spent little time on a page. If they were looking for information, they got to a page in a dictionary or reference, found it and left, the page is a success. If they are supposed to click a page in someone else's website, then the intention is that they will spend little time on that "landing page" and little time at the first website.

Successful Landing Pages

A landing page is successful model if a high proportion of visitors perform the action that you wanted them to perform, such as buying a new product or signing up for a service, as detailed below.  In that case, it has a high Conversion Rate and a low Bounce Rate according to practitioners. On the other hand, if visitors stay only a brief time at a landing page and then leave the website, the page or the site is said to have a high Bounce Rate, Most of the articles about "Landing Page" seem to be about improving Conversion Rate, so if you are looking for information about that, check the Conversion Rate entry.

Landing Page Concept Reexamined

The "landing page" concept assumes implicitly that a site is designed to have one page that draws visitors in, or to which visitors are directed, and many pages that are the "real purpose" of the site, similar to the Doorway Page.

The practical implication of the landing page concept is that there is one, or a few pages that should be the targets of a great deal of effort at optimization, because those are the ones that will bring visitors to the website. They must have the best content. They are the ones that will get the most inbound links. These are also the pages that should get the most links within the website, and they are the ones that you submit to directories and search engines. They are supposedly the lead pages in sections, such as those listed at the top right of the sidebar or in the footer of this Web site. The extra links will help those pages get higher Google PageRank, and will supposedly draw more visitors to them.

The "landing page" was apparently born before search engines became the primary drivers of traffic to Web sites. There were one or two "entrance pages" or portals with links from the outside world and many "internal" pages  The rise of the search engine began to obsolete the "landing page" concept to some extent. The Website is no longer a hierarchy that depends on its link structure. Fixating too much on the landing page concept can cause some errors that may hurt your site rather than help it. It can cause you to overemphasize hierarchical linking and closed farms (pages that link to each other and nothing else on the site) when these are not necessarily the best way of driving traffic to your site.  

The landing page model  does not apply to all websites equally. When people explain that there are "many landing pages" or in at least one case that "every page is a landing page," it seems they are stretching the concept. If every page is a landing page, then no pages are "landing pages" in a sense, and all are equal. We cannot optimize all the pages in a Web site more than all the others. Some will get more links and more attention. Every page is not a landing page. An error message page is not a landing page, and an intermediate page in a product checkout is not a landing page for example. In a section of products. the main page that lists the products had got to be more of a landing page, at least in theory, than the product pages.

Landing Pages in Organic SEO

In actual practice of organic SEO (no advertising), there really are "landing pages" whether you planned them or not. Some pages are inherently more equal than others. A small percentage of pages often get most of the traffic. However, you often cannot know in advance if a page will be popular. Here are statistics on entrance pages for traffic at an informational Web site (one of mine).

	Top Entrances   (1-20) / 548	Percent	0 9.69%
1.	Content page	9.69%
2.	Map section main page	6.78%
3.	Site main page	5.50%
4.	Map	3.75%
5.	Map	3.30%
6.	Reference page main	3.15%
7.	Content page	2.72%
8.	Content page	2.53%
9.	Content page	2.38%
10.	Content page	2.11%
11.	French translation of #1	2.10%
12.	Map	1.88%
13.	Timeline	1.87%
14.	Map	1.82%
15.	Map	1.59%
16.	1 Page Dictionary	1.40%
17.	Map Section main page in French	1.40%
18.	Content	1.38%
19.	Document Section Main page	1.14%
20.	Document	1.00%
	View Total:	57.47

Of a total of 548 entrance pages in the period measured, 20 of them accounted for over 57% of the traffic, and 10 of them accounted for almost 42%. The top page alone accounted for nearly 10% of the traffic (XML, ICO and similar junk has been filtered out).  These are all "landing" pages. However, they are not all planned as landing pages. The section main pages and the main page of the site (in bold) were obviously intended to be landing pages. The pages in bold red were also intended as landing pages that were specially optimized and that link to other pages in the site. The #1 page was intended to be the very best of its kind on the Web and I am convinced in fact that it is and will remain so for many years. It was begun in the "dark ages" before Wikipedia, which for all its faults, introduced some standards of reliability and quality to the Web.

The map pages were provided as a service. They were put on the Web in the dark ages as well, before there were any public statistics about what people might want to see at a Web site. Before Google in fact. Their success was a surprise and a matter of concern. For many years I had to fight to get non-map content pages into the top 10 or 20 entrance pages, and to try to find ways to "convert" the map visitors to visit other pages. But there is nothing to distinguish many of the top content pages from many content pages that are not among the top 20, except that some of them were about popular topics. They were certainly not well optimized at first. Empirically, I learned which pages draw visitors and were worth linking to from multiple places in the site. On another site, one of the top "draw" pages is a gag that I wrote in an afternoon on an impulse. I won't get much "conversion" from that page, but I would rather have visitors getting to the site through that page than not at all.

Note - Definitions of Search Engine Optimization terms are based on inferences from common usage and definitions given by other sources. Conclusions about search engine behavior are based on understanding of the behavior of the most popular search engines. Both are subject to error or may change. Search engine company management may define or use a term or set or change any policy in any way they see fit, and may make these definitions and specifications public or not. These decisions and definitions are beyond our control.  

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