Start Converting Visitors to Leads With Landing Pages

The goal of landing pages is to convince the visitor to provide you with his or her information in exchange for a high-value offer.  They are the best way to convert a person into a lead. Most small and medium-sized businesses have very few--if any--landing pages on their sites. Research has indicated that 62% of businesses using landing pages have less than 6. Even though they’re not optimally positioned to capture contacts, these companies still have to try really hard to increase their website traffic.

This is really pointless if you don’t have the means to capture contact data.  Way too many people are concerned with their organic rankings on Google while forgetting about the sales aspect of their business.  Isn’t the point of your website to get your visitors to buy your product or service?

[caption id="attachment_3535" align="aligncenter" width="957"] Subway Landing Page Example[/caption]

Why Do I Need Landing Pages?

Obviously the ultimate goal is to have the visitor purchase immediately, but this is actually even rarer than you think--96% of first-time visitors to your website aren’t ready to buy. It’s a prime reason why you need landing pages. The next best option is to generate a lead by capturing  visitors’ contact data and adding them to your sales funnel. You will now have the opportunity to email them and nurture them down your sales funnel by continuing to market to them via email, phone calls, or social media to influence them to buy from you.  The more landing pages you have, the more opportunities to generate leads and fill your funnel.

A landing page needs a form to capture contact data for a website visitor. In most cases, you do not want to include your main navigation bar at the top of the landing page so the visitor’s only option is to complete the form. Not including the navigation bar has been shown to increase conversion rates by as much as 100%.

Creating a Landing Page

All of your content on the landing page should be contained above the fold.  This means that the visitor should not be required to scroll down to see any of the page content. Effective landing pages will also contain an image that is relevant to the call-to-action button that drove the visitor to the landing page. The text should be very direct and easy to read.

Landing Page Tips:

• Use a compelling title that is relevant to your CTA.


• Place all of your content above the fold.


• Keep your opening and closing paragraphs to 3-5 sentences.


• Use bullet points to clearly display your value propositions.


• Add a compelling image that is clearly relevant to your offer.

[caption id="attachment_3537" align="aligncenter" width="1161"] 12 Step Landing Page Theory[/caption]

How to Use Landing Pages

A landing page is typically linked to an offer. An offer can be advertised through a call-to-action button on your site, a link in your on-page text, a PPC ad, or even a QR Code on a billboard or a piece of print marketing material.  The point is, you can link to a landing page from just about anywhere and you will want to because landing pages are so effective.

The design of your landing page is extremely important and affects the conversion rate of your forms.  The look, headline, and text must all be relevant to the offer to obtain a high conversion rate.  Design does matter, but that doesn’t mean you need a graphic designer, especially if you use marketing software such as HubSpot, which allows anyone to easily create landing pages.

All too often, we see the cardinal sin of PPC when people link their campaigns to their homepage instead of a landing page.  Another benefit of using these pages, aside from  capturing the data, is that most software should capture visitor data and segment it for you, so you know the exact source of your visitors and new leads. If you are not able to track this data, you will never know how successful your campaign is and you probably need to look into a software such as HubSpot that tracks it for you.

Takeaway

Start building landing pages today and build lots of them--companies that increase their number of landing pages from 10 to 15 receive 55% more leads. Your Contact Us page is technically a landing page, but it does not qualify someone as a lead, so start creating some offers or link your ad campaigns to your newly designed landing pages.  If you need some help with this, please let us know.

How to use LinkedIn to Boost Your Profile’s Views for SEO

LinkedIn is really even more of a popularity contest than Twitter, but I’m the only one with enough sense to realize it. On a very basic level, if you don’t have any LinkedIn connections, you’re not going to be found. The vast majority of searches on the burgeoning social media network for professionals are done through a filter of personal connections. Optimizing your network and the SEO aspects of your profile can take your profile views go from 0 to 1,000.

Connect with me on [LinkedIn]

1. Use Anchor Text in Links

Every LinkedIn profile can list as many as 3 links. The default options include “Company Website” and “Blog,” and these just aren’t very SEO-friendly. You can customize the anchor text in your URLs by selecting the “Other” option. Use a keyword-rich title, such as “My Inbound Marketing Blog.”

2. Finish Your Profile

This one is almost a no-brainer, but far too many of us haven’t taken the time to fully complete our LinkedIn profiles. Ask for recommendations (and give recommendations back), fill out every single section, and use LinkedIn’s help to guide your profile to completion.

3. Keyword-Optimize Your Job Titles

We’re definitely not recommending you describe your last position as “Management,” when it was more administrative. However, optimizing your job titles slightly to include a few keywords is just smart. Instead of “Blog Manager,” bait search engines by clarifying “Inbound Marketing Strategy Blog Manager.”

4. Maximize Your Group Membership

Joining and participating in relevant groups won’t just expand your network, but it can improve your profile’s SEO. Since the group names appear on your profile, search engines have no choice but to crawl the titles and learn more about who you are and what you do. Not only will industry-relevant groups improve the keywords on your profile, but local groups like “Nashville Marketing Professionals” can help with geo-targeted SEO.

5. Aggressively Expand Your Network

If your LinkedIn network is one-fourth the size of your Facebook connections, it might be time to search your email contacts. Plus, it’s the perfect platform for connecting with colleagues but still maintaining a semblance of work-life separation on social media. Entrepreneur Rick Stomphorst writes: “[LinkedIn search results] elevate results for connections within a network (i.e. 1st, 2nd, 3rd level connections, groups). Therefore...you need to be connected to as many people as possible.”

6. Optimize Your Job Descriptions

Lindsay Hunt recommends that “your job descriptions on LinkedIn should be creative, truthful, descriptive and succinct.” Instead of writing out full paragraphs, use a wide variety of relevant keywords in bullet-pointed lists. Formatting your descriptions will also increase your profile’s scannability.

7. Claim Your Vanity URL

The fundamental SEO benefits of claiming your vanity URL may be minimal, but it’s just good business. Connecting your LinkedIn profile to your name will allow you to be found easier by real-life connections. It will also let you add your custom URL to business cards.

8. Don’t Keyword Stuff

While you never want to hide what it is you do from search engines, repeating the same keyword ad naseum throughout your profile isn’t going to give you much search benefit. Take an approach of optimizing around secondary keywords that are still relevant and descriptive of your skill set.

9. Promote Your LinkedIn Profile Elsewhere

Put a link to your LinkedIn profile on Facebook, Google+, and any websites you maintain to create inbound links.

10. Be Vigilant About Building Recommendations

Turns out, recommendations may have more benefit than just making you look likeable to potential employers.Stormphorst believes 10 or more recommendations will elevate your profile’s search ranking.

11. Leave No Field Blank

Your LinkedIn profile shouldn’t leave too much to the imagination. Fully optimize your Honors & Awards and Languages.

12. Shamelessly Self-Promote

There’s little hard-and-fast evidence that promoting your latest eBook or high-performing blog content in the projects section of your profile will improve your SEO, but some believe it works in your benefit. Besides, being able to increase the visibility of your latest content marketing project certainly can’t hurt, right?

13.Keep Collecting Endorsements

While endorsements currently carry little weight in how well your profile ranks on Google or in LinkedIn search results, rumor has it that this fact will soon change. During the release of the new functionality in September 2012, Dave Kerpen stated “...the more endorsements for your skills and talents that you get, the more often you’ll appear in search results.”