In honor of one of my favorite films, “High Fidelity”, I give you number 5 of my all time, top 5 landing page optimization (define) recommendations.

#5 Landing Page Optimization Recommendation
Match a search query with the product or service the searcher is pursuing

The main reason for optimizing a landing page is to improve the user experience and to improve conversion. I’m constantly amazed at how, in SEO circles, focus is on search traffic, but not enough on what happens when that traffic gets to your site. Natural search traffic is the sweet spot, you’re likely to get traffic whose intent matches the solution/service/product you provide. Awesome! But if you want to convert that click into a conversion, you need to carry the “scent” you established with the search query that led to the visit.

For example, if I go to Google and type in “buy DaKine surf bag” The first query takes me to an online store, Tactics. This is a nice looking page, but it doesn’t take me to a page to let me “buy DaKine surf bag”. So what do I do as a user? Normally I’d bail and go back to the search results and see if I can get any closer to my need, but for the purposes of our experiment, I keep looking-I click on Surf Accessories, I see pads and leashes, not bags, then I click on the other 2 links available under the DaKine Surf Shop, Car Racks and Straps, not there, my only other option, DaKine Rash Guards, not there. I click on surf shop, not there either. To their credit, if I use their internal site search, define the DaKine brand and type in surf bag, I finally find the bags, but under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble. This defines the need for landing page optimization and the need to carry “scent”.

In a perfect world, I would have been taken to this page, a page I couldn’t find in my initial search.

So what’s my recommendation:

#5 Create site flow that supports search “scent”

If you want to be found for “buy DaKine surf bag” make sure that the traffic you push to your site can easily find and buy a DaKine surf bag. It sounds simple, it’s not. Spend some time analyzing your analytics and learn what your top converting pages are, then improve them. There are some great tools to make it more simple. Use Google Website Optimizer (or engage an SEO firm that does). It’s a great free multivariate and A/B testing tool. Learn what elements on a page help convert your traffic to customers and begin getting better results from your website. The first step in this optimization process is making sure that you carry the scent from the search query to the page you deliver. Next time I’ll give you my #4 of my all time, Top 5 Landing Page Optimization Recommendations.