Fri, 16 Mar 2007 02:08:15 by Jayson Munday
As our world gets faster, people become more and more inclined to shortcut everything in their lives. There literally aren’t enough hours in the day. This fact of our modern world has spilled over into the way people connect through the web.
On average people read their screens approximately 25% slower than they would traditional media. So guess what, you’re lucky if someone reads all of the content on your site, generally people scan and skip through the words, picking up only the important sections. Hey, anything to reduce wasted time right?
So what are some techniques to help you capture this fast paced searcher? One of the most important factors is creating landing pages. Landing pages direct people straight to a part of your site that they are interested in, not your homepage. For example, if I was to search for discount jeans, and a link appeared in the results pointing to your website, it would take directly to the page that sold the discount jeans, nowhere else.
The creation of landing pages streamlines the user’s experience. Remember, most people are too busy to go to your homepage, and to try and navigate through your site to find the information they desire. Generally you have seven seconds and two clicks before they’re off, searching again. Another little fact that generally keeps people on their toes, your competitors are only one click away!
So here is some advice:
• Keep the landing pages simple. Don’t offer too many choices, it’s know as the “Swiss army knife challenge”. Like I mentioned before, people are busy, make it easy for them.
• Create a strong call to action, make it obvious for them, remember they skip and scan.
• Only ever ask for:
1. Name
2. Email
3. Phone
People do not like filling out a whole bunch of questions, and why should they?
All in all, landing pages are a great way of capturing that conversion. The average conversion rate for sites that do not utilize landing pages is 2%. Compare that to sites that embrace multimedia landing pages that convert 5% to 30%. These sites also record about a 2.5 to 15 times increase on their return on investment.
So there you have it, landing pages, a great tool for any website.
Good luck and happy searching.
Jayson Munday
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