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Hot: These tips are meant for marketing experts.
Bottom Line: Use landing pages to ensure that site visitors get everything they want in as few clicks as possible.
Do This: Use landing pages to get high-quality leads by remembering these key steps...
If you’ve ever clicked a link online and ended up on a page that had nothing to do with what you were expecting, you know how frustrating a rocky landing online can be. Whether users are clicking to your site from Google, social media, or an email, sending them to the right place is the key to keeping them on your page and converting them into a strong lead. Which is why we’re talking about landing pages!
A good landing page is like a direct flight: no layovers, no turbulence, no missed connections. If you got on a plane and the landing was especially rough or you landed in the wrong destination, you’d be pretty upset!
That same logic applies online. Landing pages are where you direct users from a specific referral source that has all of the information they need in one place.
If you run an ad on Facebook for a 3-bedroom house in Pittsburgh and someone clicks on it, they expect to see information about that 3-bedroom house. If they instead get sent to your home page or the general search page and now have to find the property themselves, that’s a pretty rocky landing. If they end up looking at a completely different listing in a different city, that’s a really rocky landing! In this scenario, the landing page for your ad should be a detail page about the specific property referenced in your ad.
Short answer: Yes!
Landing pages give users exactly what they want in the most convenient way possible. This means they find the information they need on your site, rather than going somewhere else. If you drop them onto your homepage and leave them to hunt for what they want, most people will leave and try somewhere else.
Successful landing pages have three key elements: message matching, easy to use CTA’s, and a quick load time. These three elements are essential to giving users the best experience possible and in turn ensuring the highest conversion rate possible.
Matching Messaging
Basically, give visitors what you sold them on. If they clicked an ad or post on Facebook about a specific property and you link them to your homepage or general property search page, they’re not going to stick around. They clicked your link because that specific property looked interesting. They want to learn about that listing, so sending them straight to the property detail page is essential.
This applies to content of all kinds, not just property listings. If you decide to run hiring ads, create a dedicated landing page. Landing pages should match the colors, images, and overall messaging of the referral source. So if you run a social media ad or send an email campaign out that tells people you’re hiring, uses blue and green as the main colors, and has an image of your office, the landing page should include all of those same elements.
By matching as many elements as possible between the referral source and the landing page, you show users that they’re getting exactly what was advertised. This builds their confidence, which is important if you want them to actually take some sort of action. Which brings us to...
Clear CTAs
Now that you’ve gotten the user to your site and made sure they’re seeing exactly what they expected, you need to get them to take action. You should never have numerous CTA’s on a landing page. Generally speaking, you want to give them very few options - submit some sort of form or leave.
Unlike in blogs or other types of content, you don’t want to have a bunch of links to other pages or resources. Your landing page should provide users with the information they expect, then ask them to take action. If they have the option to follow links to other pages, they won’t come back and complete the goal you set up.
In the case of the hiring ad we talked about above, you’d want the landing page to provide information about your company, benefits, positions available, and any other relevant info, along with a form to contact the hiring manager. You don’t want to have links to your about page or blog, even though it seems like a good way for them to learn more about the company. Landing pages are about converting general traffic to high-quality leads. Give people information and provide a clear, easy-to-complete CTA - no more, no less.
A Quick Loading Speed
The page speed of your landing page is often overlooked. If your landing page takes 5 seconds or more to load, the chances of the user bouncing increase dramatically.
Freebie Alert! You can use this free page-speed tester from Google.
Make sure your images and resources are optimized. Scrap anything that’s unnecessary or slowing you down. It’s just not worth the chances of a user bouncing before your page even loads.
If you’re driving people to a certain listing, the landing page might be a dedicated details page for that property. If you have a site with a modern, powerful IDX, these pages are already set up for you! Each property displayed on your site has a dedicated details page with all of the information provided to the MLS on it.
If your website doesn’t have auto-generated details pages for each property, you’ll have to create a new page or blog entry to act as a landing page. (That sounds like an awful lot of manual work to us, which is why the ListingManager IDX system automatically creates a landing page for each property in the MLS. Our platform, like any good IDX, also allows you to add enhancements to your listings - like virtual tours or videos. Our social sharing links pull the first image from the property listing into your post when you share on social media, so users will see the same picture and information on your ad or post as they do on the page. This means that sending people to learn more about your listings is extremely easy. We also build in CTA’s on every details page for users to easily ask for more information about the property.)
If you’re running ads or emails around something other than listings - careers, free home valuations, or home staging tips - you will have to create a landing page on that topic. Makes sense, right? If you want to appear as an expert on a topic, you’ll want to have at least one page dedicated to that topic.
Landing pages are a key element of online advertising and promotion. By giving users a straightforward path to find what they want and to provide you with their contact info to find out more, your online efforts become a lead generating machine!
One of our secret weapons for helping clients build traffic? Community-based landing pages. Create individual landing pages for the top communities you serve (or want to serve). Give them SEO-rich titles like "Houses for Sale in (Neighborhood)." Fill them out with content about that neighborhood (school ratings, community amenities, local establishments). And if you have IDX, fill in the listings for sale in that area.
Eventually, Google will recognize that these pages are super valuable to people searching for "Houses for Sale in (Neighborhood)". You'll have a higher chance of showing up in search results.
Landing pages prevent a rocky landing for your users and help you grow your business - it’s a win win!
Working with ListingManager allows Jess to explore an alternate reality where she could one day own a house instead of renting. When she’s not focused on her daily to-do lists, Jess enjoys HBO binges, gourmet lattes, and playing with her dog. How did you like this article?
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