Landing pages help promote your company’s products and services and encourage conversions from your web traffic. A landing page, officially any page on which you land, always has its own unique url. Landing pages can be temporary—thrown up as part of a campaign to promote a product or service. People will click on a call to action and land on this page; it’s generally taken down once the campaign is over. The messaging on these pages should be crisp, focused and direct. These landing pages are necessarily shorter.

Longer landing pages promote trust and credibility

The landing pages that promote your products and services need to have more substance—that means 300+ words. Longer landing pages generate trust and credibility, motivating web visitors to convert once they’ve learned more about you and your company. The user who scrolls to the bottom where the call to action is located and views all aspects of the page is typically a higher-quality lead—that’s the potential client who wants information about what you do. Don’t disappointment them by not answering their questions about what you do and how you work with your clients.

Short landing pages translate to missed opportunities

Longer landing pages: increased SEO value

As you increase the likelihood of conversion with longer landing pages, you also increase the SEO value of your website. Longer pages rank better in search engines. Use well-written, high-quality content that positions you as an expert.

• Think about using quality video that explains your product. If it’s a service, provide an explanation of how it works. Testimonials are always effective.
• Include images, a bulleted list of a product/service’s benefits and a strong call to action.
• Also think about leveraging internal linking strategies within the pages on your site.

These days, people seem to be text-phobic

I frequently find myself going to websites to get more information—and am rewarded with a few lame sentences that translate to missed opportunities. Whether you’re selling a product or service, why wouldn’t you provide enough information to fully flesh out your business? If you’re selling your products online, longer landing pages with plenty of description is always recommended. If people are spending money, they want detailed information about the product they’re about to purchase.

I became I believer in long landing pages

I finished a project a few months ago that made me a believer in longer landing page content. It was a website for a lighting manufacturers’ rep, and I had to write descriptions of the 90+ manufacturers with which this company worked. Our goal was to provide comprehensive information about each company because we wanted potential clients to come to our site and stay there.

I quickly ramped up to the fascinating and complex lighting industry. I wanted to find out a little bit about each of these companies—did they specialize in lighting, controls or daylighting? Were they family-owned, where did they manufacture their products, what was the time to market and what did their customer service ethic look like? The quality of these 90 sites varied dramatically. Some were beautiful, with comprehensive portfolios of their national and international lighting projects. Others were dismal. Some sites didn’t even have an About section—nothing but product info and numbers. Others had badly written information about the company, sometimes talking about the company’s founders some 80 years ago—in which I had no interest. I ultimately had to work with my client SME to get enough information to flesh out some of these profiles.

I learned a big lesson from this project: Provide the information that will answer people’s questions

• As a guide, think about your own questions when you go to a website looking for information.
• Frontload the important stuff so that it’s readily available in the first few paragraphs.
• Try providing a call to action higher in your page rather than burying it at the bottom. Convert people while you still have their attention rather than taking a chance that they’ll scroll to the bottom of the page.

Have questions about landing pages? Talk to us at Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and internet marketing experts.