Your SEO and online advertising efforts are driving a lot of shoppers to your San Diego business’s website—and that’s great. But there’s even more you could be doing to drive sales. If you want to make sure that more of the people who come to your website actually stick around and make a purchase while they’re there, the effective creation and use of landing pages can help.

What’s a landing page, you ask? A landing page is a page that users are taken to when they click on a link in your online ad, email newsletter, Facebook post or other marketing avenue. It’s not your website’s home page. The landing page encourages users to take a specific action—usually related to the link they clicked from.

For instance, if you send out an email offering “25 percent off women’s clothes this week,” the link that users click should take them not to the general home page (where they could get frustrated trying to find that women’s clothing sale), but to a landing page featuring the specific women’s clothing items that are 25 percent off. If you’re an accountant who placed an online ad for your tax preparation seminar, the landing page should be all about signing up for that seminar. The more narrowly you target the landing page, the more likely users are to take the desired action.

To create an effective landing page:

• Know what you want users to do. Create a call to action that shares the benefits of your product or service. Make sure every element on the page pushes them toward the desired action.
• Keep it simple. Too much visual clutter will distract from the call to action you’re trying to create. Avoid any extraneous links—the only links on a landing page should be those that are used to take the action you want users to take, such as “Buy Now” or “Contact Us.”
• Speaking of links, don’t make them look boring. Using colorful buttons makes it easier for users to see what to do.
• Make sure your landing page harmonizes with your overall website. Don’t make the landing page so streamlined that it’s not recognizable as your brand. If that’s the case, users may get worried they’ve landed on an untrusted site.
• Keep it current. Update your landing pages as needed and eliminate ones that are no longer active. The last thing you want is to drive users to a page with outdated information or an expired offer—that will make them think you don’t know what you’re doing.
• Test and retest. Test different versions of landing pages to see what works best. Use SEO to optimize your landing pages for search just as you do with your whole website.

Properly used, your San Diego website’s landing pages are a great tool for increasing customer engagement, generating leads and driving more sales.