Landing Pages – The Basics

​Back in 2004 I needed to attract visitors to a custom printing website for invitations. The business was a small start-up. Its web presence was being drowned out by the larger printing companies' websites.

​How was I going to bring the businesses’ products before customer’s eyes?

​Lesson 1 - Quality Over Quantity

A mentor told me early on, “It’s not about the number of people visiting your website; it’s about the people wanting to be there.”

My first reaction was to disagree. Didn't we want to have as much visitors as possible? This was during a time that webmasters hid dubious search terms irrelevant to the website's content into its pages to get their site up in search results. Since then, these practices have been banned.
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The question I needed to ask myself was: “What did this printing business offer its customer that they were looking for?” Narrowing in on these searches would bring the site quality customers that would want to be there.

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​Lesson 2 – What Makes Your Product Stand Out

Narrowing keyword terms down to ‘custom invitation printing’ was not enough for this website to be noticed among its competition.

I had to find its niche offerings. What was this business offering that the customer was looking for?
With help of the Google Ad Words tool I found people were looking for specific invitations that the website offered such as ‘Jasmine princess invitations,’ ‘first birthday invitations,’ ‘pooh birthday invites.’
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​Lesson 3 – Give Them What They Came For

​Now that I found the specific keywords I would use for the business’ website I could put them all into one landing page. However, I wanted the customer looking for ‘first birthday invitations’ to find just that and not have to weed through pages of irrelevant cards.

I decided to create separate landing pages with keywords specific to the offering.
Guess what? It worked! Pretty soon, visitors found their way to the unique offering that this business had to bring to the marketplace.

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You may say “that was in 2004! Things have changed!” Yes, you are right, since then the landscape of search has changed tremendously. For one, we have Social Media. Secondly, analytical platforms have become more advanced. We have more tools to help us fine-tune our Search Engine Optimization to reach our audience.
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However, the basics remain the same.