Web Copywriting, Landing Pages and Bicycling in Italy
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What makes a landing page work? To get to the heart of this question, we first have to ask what we mean by “work.”
If you’re creating a landing page for your product or service, your ultimate goal is to sell that product or service. Well, duh…
But how often do you click on a link in Google, either from an ad or one of the search engine results, and wonder what they’re trying to sell you?
To help you understand what works and what doesn’t, we’re going to take a bike trip to Italy. Right now. Get your bags packed and your bike shorts ready, because here we go…
Bicycling in Italy Landing Pages
Let’s start with this page. What if you did a search for “Bicycling in Italy” on Google and came across this page you’re reading now. It’s unlikely that you would have read even this far down the page because you could immediately tell that the article wasn’t going to tell you diddly squat about biking in Italy.
In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if this page gets a higher Google ranking for biking in Italy than for web copywriting or landing pages, but that’s an entirely different article.
When you do a search online, you expect that the search engine will give you web pages that are at least marginally helpful. And, when you click on an ad in the search engines, you would expect that the web page would be JUST about your topic.
At least, that’s what you’d expect….
Now, let’s look at the top couple of ads. They’re probably paying around $2 or more per click. Here’s what you see when you click on the first two ads:
You’ll see a stark contrast between the two. I love REI. I spend about $1500 a year at REI, but this landing page is not only uninspiring, it’s bad marketing.
Problem Number One: REI will pay more per click.
REI’s ad will get a low quality score by Google because the landing page never mentions the primary keyword “bicycling in italy” or “biking in italy”. The lower quality score means that they’ll pay more for each click than their competition.
Problem Number Two: Is this a scavenger hunt?
I want information about biking in Italy. What’s all this other stuff? If your visitor has to hunt down the information they want, you’ll lose them before you ever get their attention, pretty pictures or no.
Problem Number Three: No clear call to action.
Note the brochure request. Although their request form has FAR too many fields (they’d increase their conversion rate with fewer fields), at least they have a lead capture method. For REI, you have to scroll down the page to see some of the options for cycling in Italy.
REI’s landing page will cater to people who specifically want to go on a trip with REI. They would definitely get more bang for their advertising dollars if they created separate landing pages for each adventure, and had their ads point to the keyword-specific landing pages.
Evaluating Organic Search Landing Pages
Claiming the top spot is a simple, unformatted article that looks like something out of Al Gore’s internet creation of the 80’s.
All I can say is… WOW. How difficult would it be for any one of those advertisers to do a little optimization and get their landing pages to the top of the search engines? Probably not much.
Now we’re talking. The number two listing is clearly about cycling in Italy. Nice job, folks.
However, there’s one glaring problem with this landing page. Although the picture and the caption are compelling, you don’t know what to do next. It took me a few seconds to figure out that I needed to click on one of the little flags at the bottom of the screen.
NEVER, EVER make your landing page visitors guess at what you want them to do!
Make the next step clear and simple. “Click here to see our tours for 2009!“
The moral of this story is to keep it simple, make things clear and easy for your visitors, tell them what to do, and then create a way to capture and keep their attention.
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