Landing Pages: Think Simple, Think Specific

It took a long time for big companies to enter the world of search marketing, and once they did there was sudden fierce competition for the moms and pops out there eking it out online. Now, as then, those same moms and pops can outmaneuver the big boys by capitalizing on bigger company weaknesses. Today’s advantage: landing pages.

Landing pages, for uninitiated, are where customers end up after clicking on a search ad or search result. Ideally, they serve as a sort of sign on the window, or an important step on the way toward a sales conversion. Remarkably, big companies are still getting this part of the process wrong.

Last summer, using a particular digital camera as an example, we explored how companies like Wal-Mart, Target, Circuit City, and other retailers embarrassingly blew their chance at selling that particular camera. Clicking on their ads (because they ranked incredibly poorly in the organic results for the products they carry) appearing with the very specific search term led to pages that were either unrelated promotions, lists of every camera but that one, or to pages that were so irrelevant that they weren’t even in the electronics category.

(The most ridiculous was from now out of business Circuit City, whose digital camera keyword ad led to a listing for a pet odor removal product.)

If you’re like me, you find it very annoying to search for a product, believe you’ve found a link to information on that product, follow it, and then have to search again at the destination website. That, my friends, is dropping the e-commerce ball.

What they lack, obviously, is specificity, a very important element of the landing page.