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Does your website need a landing page?

Monday, July 13th, 2009

What is a landing page?

Wikipedia defines a landing page as:

the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.

Wikipedia’s definition is a good one. Here’s 10 things that you should be looking at when optimizing a landing page:

  • Relevant Content
    A landing page’s content should be related to organic search results, ad campaign, anchor text in inbound links and any other advertising, online or offline. If people don’t get what they expect, they will not stick around long.
  • Multiple Landing Pages
    A landing page shouldn’t necessarily be your homepage. In many instances a homepage is a good landing page. However, for more targeted traffic and better results, you want a landing page to be focused on specific offer and specific call for action. To accomplish this, a given website could have multiple landing pages. Create some deep link landing pages (links that go to pages deep in your website) that will focus on specific offer and your conversion rate will be higher.
  • Focus on Functionality
    More and more visitors seem to judge the professionalism and credibility of a site by its design. To satisfy this, many website owners concentrate on the design aspect instead of focusing on its functionality. A well-designed landing page is essentially worthless if the prospect can’t accomplish anything. While I wouldn’t suggest skimping on the design, it shouldn’t be your priority. Focus on the exact steps you want your visitor to take and design a page with that in mind.
  • Call To Action
    You got visitors to your landing page, now direct them to take action. Make it clear a highly noticeable without overwhelming your audience. Whether it’s a sign-up form or a “buy now” button, make it the focus of your page.
  • Send a Clear Message
    Keep your landing page clean and clutter free so your visitors stay focused on your message. Emphasize the biggest reasons that they should carry out the applicable call to action with larger text, contrasting colors, images. Make it easier for them to scan the content by using lists and getting right to the point.
  • Offer Incentive
    Bribing your visitors with freebies and samples is a proven method of enticing them to sign up. Offer more then your competition but don’t sell yourself short either. Provide a list of reasons why your offer is better and what exactly the visitor can expect. Provide references and testimonials.
  • Make Visitors Stay
    Avoid sending your visitors to another page unless it is absolutely necessary. That includes any internal navigation as well as external banners. If you remove all distractions and limit navigation options, you stand a better chance of keeping your visitors around.
  • Simple is Better
    Make it easy for your visitors to complete the action you want them to. Less confusion and decision making for your visitor means better conversions rate for your landing page. Don’t offer multiple choices and throw in optional extras. Focus on the offer the page was created for.
  • Power of Freebies
    Everyone likes free offers. They are hard to resist and can be a powerful conversion tool. Whether a call to action is free or something free is received as a result of carrying out a call to action, it certainly doesn’t hurt. If your competition charges for something and you offer it for free, you’ll win the customer. Remember, just because you make a free offer doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be quality.
  • Testing
    Testing various text, call to action forms, layouts will give you true idea what produces the best results as far as conversion. Using a tool like Google’s Website Optimizer you can easily monitor the conversion rate, bounce rate, and tons of other useful metrics found in most modern day web analytics tools. Using these metrics you can easily figure out which version will be your optimal page, one that maximizes the results.

Creating a successful and effective landing page takes a lot of work but should be the focus for anyone involved with a website. Whether you are a website owner, web designer, web developer or a web marketing specialist you must be aware of the components that comprise a solid landing page. After all this can mean website’s success or failure.

Christopher Grant, CEO of GORGES, has been building Internet web sites and commerce applications since 1994, pioneering early database-driven Web application and e-commerce projects. He has been instrumental in the construction of hundreds of Internet projects, large and small.

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Posted in Marketing, Website Design | 2 Comments »

The most important part of your corporate website

Monday, July 6th, 2009

Here at Gorges Web Sites, we have designed and programmed dozens and dozens of corporate websites.  Our many years of experience has led us to establish our own process for delivering business websites on a budget.

Most of our customers approach us with great ideas for the graphic design and features they would like to see on their websites.  When meeting with customers for our kickoff meeting and planning process, we avoid these topics.

Why? Isn’t the graphic design and features of a site important?  Yes, however, our process starts with the main objective your site visitors have when landing on your site.  If your website is selling or marketing products or services, your visitors are there for INFORMATION.  They don’t really care about colors, web 2.0 whiz-bang features which cost a ton, or how cool your blog software is. They have a question in their heads, and our job as website designers is to answer that question.

So the first most important step in website design is called ‘Information Architecture’.  We spend a fair amount of time talking about menus, pages, sidebars, page layouts, headings, and CONTENT.

Our goal in working with you to design your website is to deliver the key information that your customers need in a way that is easy for them to find.  We don’t want to keep them guessing which obscure menu name they have to click to find the information they are looking for.

If we can answer your prospective customers’ questions in one or two clicks and get them moving towards making a decision, then we consider our job well done.

After this process, we get into colors, styles, features, and other tactics to get your site looking top-notch.

If you’d like to hear more, we always offer no-obligation consultations to hear from you and make suggestions as to how we can help make your website work for you.

Christopher Grant, CEO of GORGES, has been building Internet web sites and commerce applications since 1994, pioneering early database-driven Web application and e-commerce projects. He has been instrumental in the construction of hundreds of Internet projects, large and small.

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Posted in General, Marketing, Website Design | No Comments »

What is the best way to manage the content of a website?

Monday, April 20th, 2009

So you have or are considering a website for your business, and know that you need to manage the content, but what is the best way to do so?screenshot_1

In the old days of the web, content management was done using the same people who programmed the site.  They would open up the right file, edit the content, and ftp the new file up to the web server.

These days, that process is slow and error-prone, and the management of your content should be done by the business owners, product managers, editors, or marketing personnel.

Use of a content management system (CMS) is imperative if your site is going to function as a quality business growth tool for you.  You need a CMS that is easy to use and always accessible.  Search engines and human visitors both are looking for fresh, relevant and updated content.

Big budget publishing companies have sophisticated work flow software to manage the development of their content, allow editors to review this content, and publishing editors to approve for release.

But what is the small website owner to do? At Gorges Web Sites, we have been delivering special-purpose content management systems for years now.  At first, we used our own CMS, affectionately named ‘GoGorges’, which is a linux- and php-based development framework and content management system that we steadily improved over many projects.

More recently, though, the open-source content management systems have really come of age.

On recent projects, we have used:

Each of these systems have pros and cons, and through experience we have learned which one is most suited for a particular set of business and publishing needs.

The great news is that the use of these content management systems has lowered the cost for delivery of a sophisticated website.  You can get more functionality for less $ than ever before!

If you’d like to learn more about how one of these content management systems can help your business and improve your search engine optimization rankings, then fill out our quick form for your free consultation and we’ll jump on a call to discuss.

Christopher Grant, CEO of GORGES, has been building Internet web sites and commerce applications since 1994, pioneering early database-driven Web application and e-commerce projects. He has been instrumental in the construction of hundreds of Internet projects, large and small.

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Posted in Content Management | 1 Comment »

Marketing your web site – do you need SEO?

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

Here at Gorges Web Sites, we receive many requests for information about web site promotion.  For most people, this seems to boil down to SEO (Search Engine Optimization), or more directly ‘how do I get good ranking on Google’?  If you are really and truly interesting in growing your online business, this blog article is for you.  And as you will see, it is about much more than just SEO.

If you would like to experience the most cost-effective growth possible for your site and your business, there are 5 areas to focus on, and SEO is NOT the first:

  1. Analytics: We can’t judge the effectiveness of any marketing effort, or evaluate growth without metrics.  We highly, highly recommend Google Analytics.  It is free, and easy to install on your site.  Get it on your site before taking any more steps.  You will be amazed at the wealth of data the Google sends your way.  This simple tool will tell you what pages on your site have the highest attention, where your viewers come from, which keywords are delivering traffic, the effectiveness of your paid advertising, and much more.  Get your analytics going BEFORE you undertake any additional steps.  Do it today.
  2. Social Marketing: Building your online business requires much more than optimizing content.  It is crucial that you engage and learn from your early customers.  Foster community, push your site, generate referrals, blog about your ideas everywhere, write content, post fliers at the coffee shop.  Use facebook, twitter, put a blog on your website, encourage your visitors to add content to your site via topical discussions.  Draw your audience into ongoing discussions on your web site.  Think outside the box, drive traffic.  Start now and keep it simple and low-cost.  You are the driving passion behind your idea and your web site, let the world hear your voice.
  3. Public Relations: This step is about your relationship with your broader community.  You need to lean on traditional PR to strengthen your brand and expertise.  Build a positive opinion about your company to your neighbors, partners, employees, the public, and potential investors.  Generate press releases, develop positive relationships with the media, and build your brand in the public’s mind.
  4. SEO: What you are reading this article to find out about is likely Search Engine Optimization.  A properly constructed web site takes SEO into consideration during the design and information architecture steps.  SEO should not be an ‘afterthought’ that you outsource to some agency.  SEO is the lifeblood of your site and needs to be planned in.  If your site is not architected well, you can ‘optimize’ keywords all day long without effect.  Traditional SEO has 2 components: 1) Your site content, structure, links, keywords, menus, etc, and 2) In-links from 3rd party sites.  If you have done #2 and #3 above, you are already building in-links (continue!).  If you have proper data analysis and analytics running on your site (from #1 above), you will have up-to-date metrics on how well your site is doing.  OK, so you’ve done all of the above, built the site correctly, have analytics installed, and are generating traffic through your own efforts, it is time to analyze and optimize your site.  In an SEO analysis, we look at menu structure, content structure, keywords, title tags, meta tags, your site map (you do have a site map don’t you?), and more.  Taking as input your desired list of keywords and key-phrases, we will tune one or more content pages to maximize exposure to the words that make most sense for your business.  When done, we will watch your analytics and encourage steps 2 and 3 above as ongoing traffic-building efforts.
  5. Paid Search: Now, with all of this in place, a paid search or adwords campaign can be constructed and tuned.  Start small, have a short list of keywords and reasonable budget.  This is not about branding, this is about driving traffic.  Determine your target cost per acquisition of new customers, and evaluate if your paid search is delivering.  Drop key phrase campaigns that aren’t delivering; turn the budget up on campaigns that are delivering.

Summary: The order above is crucially important.  Don’t spend a penny on paid search or paid advertising until you can track performance, have developed brand awareness, and are engaging your community about your business and areas of expertise.  Get this together and watch your business grow exponentially.

Christopher Grant, CEO of GORGES, has been building Internet web sites and commerce applications since 1994, pioneering early database-driven Web application and e-commerce projects. He has been instrumental in the construction of hundreds of Internet projects, large and small.

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Posted in Marketing | 1 Comment »

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