Identifying great landing pages

A landing page is the page your website visitors "land on" when arriving at your website. A landing page could be your home page, or any other page receiving traffic in your website. A landing page may be the visitor's first experience of your brand, or landing pages may serve repeat visitors who are coming back through any number of marketing channels.

For search, any number of pages in a website may serve as a landing page depending on a particular query a user is searching for. Search engines will select the most relevant page in your website, or if your site, as a whole, is relevant for a particular query, your homepage may serve as a landing page. Depending on the goals of your website, whether they be lead generation, content downloads or eCommerce sales, you may want to review the performance of landing pages and optimize them for improved performance.

It is vital to discover your landing pages in order to improve goal performance for your website.

1. You can create new landing pages and use controlled traffic sources to ensure prospects are exposed to your page. Advertising is a great option for managed landing pages.
2. Also, you can discover existing landing pages that receive traffic organically from search, social or referring websites.

Identification of landing pages with Google Analtyics

Start with exploring traffic sources using web analytics. Below is a screen shot of the traffic sources for a website. Google organic is the number one web traffic referrer in this example. It would be a good idea to explore the landing page for each source.

After you select a traffic source (Google / organic or Stumbleupon.com for example), then you will need to select a secondary dimension to identify landing pages from the total traffic referred to your website from that source.

You will then receive a list of landing pages for your website. Notice that in the example below the homepage (/) is not the number one landing page based on referred traffic. Many business owners or marketing managers may lose sight of the importance of internal landing pages and focus their effort solely on the homepage. This could be a huge opportunity loss for a brand.

Each landing page may generate unique and specific queries from Google based on the content present on the page. As a next step, it is a good idea to ensure that each landing page has header tags, a strong call-to-action, unique page title and META description as well as interesting and helpful content for visitors. Try to improve the engagement on a page by optimizing content and adding visual elements to entice users to remain on the page and explore your brand's proposition.

Other web analytics tools

Hubspot is a very useful marketing automation solution. It's Page Performance Report that allows agencies to identify the performance of landing pages within a website. Hubspot has a built-in SEO progress tracking tool that helps marketers improve the performance of their website's landing pages and identify problem areas.

Another useful tool is Myseotool.com, which has a search engine crawl function that also identifies landing pages that receive traffic from Google, Bing or Yahoo. This tool can find the ranking of your website for specific keywords or identify landing pages associated with your SEO keyword strategy.