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Landing Page Design and Its Impact on Internet Marketing

By Gregory Smyth

A landing page is generally the most impoLanding Page Design and Its Impact on Internet Marketing rtant part of your website's design - even if the remainder of the site is beautifully designed, wonderfully clear, technically advanced and professional, your conversion rates will languish without proper landing page design. When a visitor lands at your site, they are looking for the answer to several questions. They want to know whether this is the right place to meet their needs, whether it matches with their expectations, whether your company is trustworthy, and how much time it will take on your site to find what they are looking for and complete related activities. Expert internet marketing services and search engine ranking optimization can bring more traffic, and better qualified traffic to your site - we show you how to ensure that you maximize that opportunity with your landing page design.

Of course, basic real-world and internet marketing principles need to be applied to a landing page, just as they are to any other business activity. You need to understand the type of visitor that will be coming to that site, and who is most likely to convert (demographically). You also need to set your metrics and put in place ways to measure the success of your landing page modifications. Once you have done that, though, visual website design elements are the most important thing to focus on for building better conversion rates.

Landing pages need to be simple - if people can't find what they are looking for within an extremely short time frame, your site will be assessed as requiring too much work, and your visitor will leave. Blocks of color, secondary navigation bars, and unnecessary clip art all serve to distract your prospects. While they may help the site's general appearance, they won't help the conversion rate. Website analytics, using packages such as Webtrends available from internet marketing service providers, will reveal quickly whether your landing page is too complicated, with a high dropout rate for a short amount of time spent on that page.

Hard-to-read type is another deadly sin when it comes to the website design of landing pages. Font sizes less than 10 points should never be considered - no visitors will read it. You should also follow basic typeface rules such as never reversing text (putting large blocks of light text on a dark background), and keeping font styles simple. And, following the same rule as not having extraneous visual elements, you should not try to put more than one offer on your landing page. This will only confuse your prospects, negate your internet marketing efforts and lose you sales.

You should also match your creative brief for advertising, for both copy and design, to your landing page. This is one way of ensuring that visitors know they have come to the right place, and greatly improves conversion rates. This is also why your website's home page should never be the landing page for advertising offers, unless you have a very specific, very static offering, and the page was designed with it in mind.