So a search engine likes my site - Now what?

This pattern is fast becoming a trend in the realm of Search Engine Optimisation. Website owners are finding that they have plenty of visitors coming to their sites all being pushed their by SEO techniques, Google AdWords and other Pay Per Click traffic generation methods.

The sad part is that all these extra visitors are not necessarily translating into extra enquiries and sales at the same exponential rate that the traffic to the site has increased.

The answer to this particularly perplexing conundrum is actually fairly simple : Search Engines Are Not People.

Search Engines may love your site and it may rank incredibly well in Google and other prominent search engines and get excellent keyword reach and relevancy from all the articles and content that you are posting to your site, but at the end of the day a search engine is not going to enquire about your latest and greatest product. So how do we get around the problem?

There are some very simple guidelines to design your landing pages to which will increase the chances of real people liking what they see and actually engaging further with you :

1. Keep the page simple. People have come through to that page for a specific reason and are looking for a specific thing, don’t complicate the page with tons of other “stuff”, just keep the info and required actions on the page relevant to what they were searching for.
2. Ensure that the visitor to the page is 100% sure about what it is that you need them to do on that page. If they need to send you a mail – tell them! And tell them a few times for the sake of clarity and ease of use. The worst thing you can have a user do is get to your landing page and say to himself, “now what do I do?”!
3. Test multiple landing page designs. Don’t assume that the first design you do is the correct one. Try a few designs and see which one gets you the best conversion results and then stick to this one. Be careful of trying to make too many changes at the same time because then you will not be able to judge which changes are the ones which worked.
4. Tell your visitor where they are. They have just come through to you through a search engine which told them that you were the right people to speak to; now reinforce that with some compelling copy that highlights what it is that they were searching for.
5. Once your visitor has completed the required action for that page, your site should direct them to a thank you page which will let them know that their enquiry has been successfully submitted. Now the cardinal sin of most websites is that they leave the page at that and they don’t try and cross sell or up sell a visitor who very clearly is interested in your product offering. Use this page to give them more info or to offer them something else that they would be interested in.

Using these guidelines will ensure that your landing pages do not suffer from having a multitude visitors but rather a throng of active participants who are willing to engage with you and take the next step in the buying cycle.