Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Optimizing Landing Pages Too Often an Afterthought

A colleague at LoSasso recently forwarded me an interesting post from BtoB online about National Semiconductor. Seems they are spending a lot more time these days making sure that website visitors driven by organic and paid search actually land on pages that will increase their chances of conversion.

By both carefully optimizing their site to draw organic search traffic to the most appropriate (and potentially profitable) pages, and by developing multiple landing pages for their PPC campaigns, they are increasing conversion by giving visitors an easy way to get what they are looking for.

According to Phil Gibson, National Semiconductor's VP-technical sales, “We're trying to customize landing pages based on search queries to get visitors to a decision point right away.”

In SEO and PPC a lot of focus is placed on ranking and click-through rates, but if the pages where people are directed are not designed for conversion (whatever that’s determined to be based on the business) then all the effort to generate the traffic is wasted.

A simple idea that is too often an afterthought.

3 comments:

Scott_L said...

Right on, this is exactly the subject of a converstaion I had recently with an SEO expert who is a friend of mine. Optimizing a landing page seems easier than trying to do a whole site - especially if it is a deep site covering lots of technologies or products.

Anonymous said...

Good PR for Google - not for analytics software though... However it is probably true that for most users Google Analytics is quite sufficient. I'm still surprised that a lot of companies don't even look at it, much less optimize it.

Unknown said...

Yes the main idea is not only to drive the traffic but also to improve the conversion rate. Some website owners do take both these terms wrong i.e more website traffic doesn't mean increased conversion rate.
landing page optimization