Happy Landings
A Landing Page is the screen visitors arrive at after clicking on a link to your site, or enter a specific domain address (we’ll get back to this).
Depending on your plan, the landing page must demonstrate one or more things to get the prospect to stay, and continue.
Users want to know the following, and more.
- Is this the website I was looking for?
- Is the style of the site what I thought it would be?
- Does this navigation give me an obvious path?
- Should I continue on this site or go back where I came from?
- Will I be able to find what I need in a few minutes or is this going to take a while?
The goal should be to give prospects the shortest path to filling out an online inquiry form.
Back to the definition of Landing Page. Long gone are the days of a single welcome screen. If your company provides products/services for several types of events other than weddings, then your website should entry points, each one optimized for that particular group of prospects. Bar Mitzvah mothers don’t care about wedding information. Corporate convention planners don’t care about weddings. High School committees and faculty are not concerned with anything but their dance or prom.
Each category of work demands its own landing page, with design and specific information for that customer. Properly customizing the content of a Landing Page should cause dramatic improvements in SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Before you even spend time thinking about any website redesign, just shorten the path. If you having paid or free linking from advertising, organization directories, or reciprocal links, make certain they are linking directly to the wedding section of your site, bypassing the welcome screen. i.e. www.DesignerMusic.com/weddings.
One of the frustrations of wedding guide publishers is that it can be difficult to track their impact on traffic to your website. My recommended solution for this is a simple on. Buy an additional domain name, just to use in print ads (even if you only advertise in one print publication).
Using the same example, for Designer Music, I would see if DesignerMusicWeddings.com were available. Assuming it was not taken, I would register it, and point it to DesignerMusic.com/weddings. Using that strategy, tracking would show direct entry DesignerMusicWeddings.com which only could have come from reading a publication where the domain appeared in your ad.
OK, that’s Lesson #1: Now, go out and spend $10/year on one more domain to point to your wedding section and update your print ads. We’ll work on the composition of Landing Pages in future posts.
Happy landings!
Andy Ebon
The Wedding Marketing Blog
Yes Beau, set up tracking within your Google Analytics for a second, third or more domain.
You got it right on the button.
Andy