Effectiveness of static landing pages

While dynamic pages offer a number of desirable features for web site owners like design consistency and up-to-date information, in order to optimize the effectiveness of your internet marketing website you’ll want a static landing page. Static landing pages offer several advantages over dynamic pages where attracting and retaining visitors is concerned. This is of course essential to converting web site visits to sales.

First, assuming you advertise your product or service on other web sites, when users arrive at your site after clicking one of your ads, most of them will leave within a few seconds if they don’t immediately see the information that prompted them to click on it in the first place. They do not want to fill in any forms, navigate your site looking for the information, or wait while the page is generated dynamically. Having the relevant information presented in a concise, statically loaded page will capture their attention and keep them from wandering away. For best results, this page should be customized for the advertisement or ad campaign that brought the visitor in. Thus, if you have different ads for a variety of products or services, each should link to a different landing page, optimized to deliver information relevant to that product or service, with a clear indication on what the user should do next. Many on-line marketers are realizing higher Click Through Rates this way.

Second, when content is dynamically generated, it may not always present the information your visitors are looking for. Pages are generated based on data, and if the data is unavailable (if for example, a service is not responding or a database is down), the page may not contain any information useful to your visitor. It may give error messages, or it may not render at all. Nothing will turn off first time visitors faster than a web site that appears to be broken. They’ll leave and likely never return.

The third and perhaps most compelling reason to utilize static landing pages on your marketing website is the simple fact that they are easier for search engines to crawl and index. In the old days, search engines couldn’t index dynamic pages at all. Now most search engines do index dynamic pages, but not as effectively as static pages. If there are too many special symbols in the URL for example (like question marks), some search engines will just skip it. If a dynamic page requires any kind of user input, like filling out forms or clicking buttons, most search engines will not be able to navigate the site and find the content. Regular html links are not a problem for search engines. That’s where a static landing page can really help. If all your relevant content is summarized on the landing page, with text links to the related areas of your site, the search engines will have no trouble indexing this information, and the text links will actually improve your rankings if you’ve used meaningful key words.

So how can you reap the rewards of a static landing page for your marketing website without sacrificing the benefits of dynamically generated content? One answer is to use a tool like “Landing Page Builder“, which in effect gives you the best of both worlds. Utilities like this one function by scanning your site, triggering the dynamic generation of the content, and automatically creating a static landing page. This page will contain a tightly focused overview of the services or products you wish to emphasize, relevant to the ads that drive the traffic to your site. When new pages are added to your site, or there are significant changes to the content, the site is re-scanned and the static landing page is re-created. With this arrangement, the majority of your site is still dynamically generated, so you retain the timeliness of the information (it’s as current as the data from which it’s drawn), but you get the consistency, performance, and search engine readiness of a static page for your visitors’ first impressions.

“Landing Page Builder” offers a few other features as well, designed to help improve the Click Through Rate of your ads and the effectiveness of the landing page. The ability to use short, descriptive URLs for your landing page makes it easier to post and email links to the page. Additionally, there is some research that indicates that people are more likely to click on shorter URLs when they appear in search results. Also, the designers of these tools are experts at Search Engine Optimization, so the pages generated do a pretty good job with keyword density and placement, which should drive additional traffic to your landing page.

If you are a web designer with the time to invest in creating customized Landing Page optimized for traffic from specific advertisements, or if you retain the services of such a designer, then this should give you some food for thought. Otherwise, it may be to your advantage to investigate an automation service for this.