This is the reason why every page is a landing page.
Suppose you are looking for a particular service, say a good law firm for example. You are online doing your research and you click on a link that takes you to an internal page of a law firms website. You are not on the glitzy home page, but a rather text heavy, boring internal page about the firms values. However, interesting this may be for someone looking for this information, for you, unfortunately, this is a complete waste of time and guess what happens next? You exit the website. That’s right a potential good customer has just left your web page and gone looking elsewhere. This is why each individual landing page has GOT to have a clear navigation structure and information funnels to guide the user to either the home page or an inquiry form. Simple as that. Either you treat each page on your website with the same amount of importance and have those visible customer friendly hot boxes, or you will be penalising yourself. In short, each page on your website is it’s own home page. Or better still, each page is a micro website. If you can get your head around this then you are well on the way to better on site conversions and in turn a higher inquiry rate.
Some great characteristics what a landing page should have.
1) The title is the first thing that every good landing page should have. This is done with your developer but it should accurately describe what the page is about. This is also what Google will read so for EO and indexing this page correctly, the title is going to make a massive difference to site visitors and ultimately conversions.
2) Have a large very visible heading. Users need to know what they page is about once they land on it. If the search query that they put into Google roughly matches the heading then this is a great start for the landing page. We call this site semantics and if this is executed properly you should see a bump upwards in your online rankings.
3) Does the landing page answer a specific question or solve a particular problem. People coming to your site, who have found it by conducting a search, are looking for a quick solution. Your landing page should be design and formatted in such a way that site visitors will be able to immediately see an answer or be able to buy what they came shopping for.
4) With Ecommerce shopping cart websites, each landing page must be aimed at converting the browser or potential customer into a paying customer. There is really no point in having the best looking home page which has a great Gooole ranking with enormous amount of traffic for your website, if the pages that really matter ( the product pages) look like they were developed in a day. Customers need to enjoy their browsing experience, not just for 1 page but for the entire site. You can add mobile version of the site to this equation as well. Poorly designed internal shopping cart pages will result in lost sales and unfortunately and I have seen this many times before, the death of the website and business. Whilst it may be a great idea and have loads of potential, if these internals are not converting users, then the site will fail – this is a 100% certain. In the web world especially when you are trying to sell a product, a near enough attitude will not suffice anymore.
As a web designer and someone who firmly believes in the power of online marketing, I cannot emphasise enough how vital it is to optimise each page of your website for conversions. As a great example, just have a look around each page of this website and will clearly see how most ( not every landing page) has been treated graphically for better conversions.