Those new to digital marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) often ask, “What is the point of a landing page?” A landing page is a page on your website designed to bring searchers onto your site. The purpose of a landing page is to bring relevant web traffic to your website.
Landing pages can be found via a link, an ad, or an organic search result. While the home page of a website is often the most prominent landing page, it is not, and should not be the only one. Any page added to a website built to draw more traffic can, and should be, considered a landing page. Routinely creating new pages or improving old ones is a fundamental element of any decent SEO strategy.
If you correctly implement your landing pages then your visitors will be directed to relevant, informative, and unique content on your website that is based on what they were looking for.
What are the Benefits of a Well Built Landing Page?
A fully optimized and carefully written landing page can lead to significant benefits for your website. You will find improved performance in your website’s traffic, leading to more opportunities to generate a conversion.
Typically, when you create a new landing page you are providing yourself with new opportunities to draw visitors to your website. You can improve your rankings for organic search terms or improve your relevancy on new paid terms. You can dedicate the page to a special promotion, drawing visitors from email, social, and paid search campaigns. Or you can write a landing page that talks all about a local attraction (perhaps even generating a link or becoming one of their “preferred hotels”).
Before you create your new landing page, you should carefully consider what your end goal will be.
- Improve your organic search rankings
- Boost your relevance for PPC campaigns
- Bring new website visitors into your sales funnel
- Draw attention to a unique selling point
How Landing Pages Improve Your Organic Rankings
Your hotel probably appears in search results for a wide variety of terms. The more relevant you are for these terms, the more likely you are to appear on a Search Engine Results Page (or SERP). When you create a new landing page and implement it properly, Google and other search engines will crawl through and index the page, which will ideally lead to improved performance in current results, or potentially to new rankings.
If there is a popular local attraction (let us say Wayne Tower) near your hotel, you may be appearing on the second or third page for searches like “hotels near Wayne Tower.” If your goal is to draw visitors of Wayne Tower to your hotel, you can create a landing page about the attraction, include relevant information about the benefits of staying near the attraction, and details about why your hotel is the best lodging option near Wayne Tower.
Local searches are not the only thing you might want to rank for! Let us say you are a pet friendly hotel and you want to attract more visitors travelling with their pets. You can create a whole landing page about your pet friendly amenities or a pet-focused special offer. The fact that you are pet friendly, your on-site restaurant, an on-site spa, and plenty of other unique services you offer could very well be a reason to create a landing page for those services if you notice search volume for a relevant term (like, “Pet friendly hotels in Gotham City”) and you want to improve your rankings.
When you launch a new landing page you should not expect an immediate jump in your organic rankings. It will first require some time for search engines to crawl your site, index the page, and determine its value. The age of a landing page is sometimes a ranking factor and it can be a few months before you begin to see your site on the first page for new terms.
You can boost this process by linking to the page in your social media channels, and linking to the page from other pages on the site using relevant keywords in the anchor text. For example, links to the ‘hotel near Wayne Tower’ page will include anchor text like ‘visit Wayne Tower’ or ‘located conveniently near Wayne Tower’.
If you are feeling really excited about the landing page, like in the case of being a pet-friendly hotel, go ahead and put out a press release with a link to the new page. These backlinks may not have a lot of SEO value, but they still help search engines discover, crawl, and index the new page.
Landing Pages and PPC Campaigns
While organic search results will take a few months to show results from your landing page, a PPC campaign can be immediately affected by the new changes to your site. For better or worse, your new content will alter how relevant Google sees your website for terms your paid campaign is targeting. This change can lead to your site competing for new keywords that you were not being considered for in the past. It can also risk lowering your relevancy for a term, making individual ads more expensive to show in search results. Most importantly, your landing page can be highly targeted for a specific set of keywords, making your existing campaigns more efficient and effective.
Another fun element of PPC campaigns is that they can direct visitors to a specific landing page. This allows you to shape your campaigns around more competitive terms with heavy targeting, and when a user clicks on it, they can be taken to exactly what they want to see.
Selling More Rooms With Landing Pages
One of the most marketable benefits you can gain when you create a new landing page is the opportunity to generate more interest in your hotel and get more people reserving rooms. When you draw new visitors into your site, you are placing them within a “conversion funnel.” Some users will likely drop off before reaching the end of the funnel, but you will have a consistent group of guests following the best path until they reserve a room.
The topic of each landing page, where visitors are drawn to your website is like the “bait” – attractive, appealing, and attention-grabbing. Once your potential guests are on the site and clicking around, you need to, at some point, introduce a “hook” – something to convince them to reserve a room.
Not every page needs to include a hard sell to earn a reservation; however, every page should be introducing and moving visitors further into your sales funnel. For example, if you were to create a landing page about a popular local attraction, and your hotel offers a package related to it (including tickets or a shuttle ride) you can call out that special offer on the attraction page where you are trying to generate visits, and include a link to it on the specials page. Now you have visitors who were originally looking to learn more about an attraction near your hotel, and those visitors are now looking at your special offers and packages! Even if you do not have a special offer for every local attraction, you can always find ways to link to special amenities, guest rooms, or in some cases meeting facilities. The goal for some of your landing pages is to take visitors from one part of your website and present them with relevant information on another part, encouraging them to click around and ideally, reserve a room.
Whether you call out a relevant topic in a thorough paragraph, or provide visitors with a simple link in your copy, or even through an exciting sidebar image, you will find opportunities to be creative and build more interactions with your website visitors. On select pages, you will find a great opportunity to call out your guest rooms and direct visitors to a page where they are expecting to see more of your guest rooms!
What You Need to Know When Writing a Landing Page
A landing page can serve multiple purposes for your hotel website. They are valuable towards drawing in new visitors to your website and improving the overall number of rooms you sell. You absolutely must consider the goal of your landing page before you begin planning it out, this will allow you to measure the success of the page later on.
You should have different expectations in regards to your pages organic rankings vs how it performs in paid search. At the same time, even if the key goal of your page is to drive new traffic to your website, you should always point your new website visitors in a direction leading them closer to converting.
At the end of the day, a clearly defined and easily measurable goal will be the guiding principle to the “point” of your landing page. What your goals will be is entirely up to you, but they will be the key point to showing if your efforts were successful or not.
Managing your online presence through an independent website can be tricky, and it is oftentimes difficult to be sure that you are doing everything you can to reach your goals. Contact our team and learn how we can help you reach your marketing goals!
