Many times, people may only think they have one landing page on their website; their homepage or a different high-traffic page. This is not correct.
In fact, every page on your website could be considered a landing page! This is why it’s essential for online retailers to take full advantage of their product pages and convert them into optimize ecommerce landing pages. Even if you think you’ve deleted the web page and product from your website, search engine’s could still be sending traffic to that page!
If you’re still unsure of what a landing page is or how to correct old product page, don’t worry! Let’s take it step by step!
What is a Landing Page?
First off, what is a landing page? A landing page could be any web page on your website that shows up in a search result. If a specific page from your site appears in the SERP of a searcher’s query, that has the potential to qualify as a landing page. This means your homepage, a specific product page, a blog article page, your company contact info page and so on. But, the main criteria that makes a web page a “landing page” is that it receives information and inspires action on the part of the visitor.
A landing page needs to be equipped with strong CTAs (or calls to action) in an effort to move an individual to toward a certain action (whether that be a form completion, a phone call, a download etc). Because search engine’s index all your website’s content, that makes them eligible to appear in a search result. All your pages have the chance of bringing new visitors to your website, so they all need to be optimized, developed, and well-designed.
True some pages that are more important than others, but each page should be treated as an important potential source of information for your customers. For instance, most of my ecommerce customers have about 1/3 of their traffic land on product pages directly from a search engine search. Those pages are typically three clicks deep from the homepage.
How to Optimize an Ecommerce Landing Page
Optimizing your product pages means much more than just SEO and design work, though that is always important. Your product pages need to be developed to keep your website visitor on that page and explore other pages on your website as well. Ecommerce landing pages need to developed to pull your website visitor in! Product page optimization is especially important for those web pages where products are out of stock either temporarily or permanently.
Have you ever been browsing a site, your own or someone else’s, and come across a 404 Error page? I have! 404 Errors are not only harmful to your site’s overall health, but can cause web visitors to leave your site as well.
Many times, people think that just by deleting a web page or product page, it will cease to exist. That’s not always the case. Having these 404 Error pages correlate to higher, negative bounce rates (meaning your visitors will leave your page immediately and go back to the search engine). High bounce rates tell search engines your visitors aren’t finding what they want. This will hurt the overall domain and page authority of your site over time if you do not fix it.
So what do you do to fix your 404 Error on your old product page? First, keep the product page turned-on and list the product “out of stock.” You can also create a 301 Redirect from the broken 404 page to a new page as well. Second, use this as an opportunity to show your knowledge and expertise in your industry by recommending an alternative product.
By either re-directing or putting new content on your old ecommerce landing page, you still have the opportunity to engage your visitor and drive a sale. Be sure to still include a CTA and maybe a form they can fill out to get more information. Remember, every page matters on your website, so you need to take advantage of places that drive traffic to your website! For online retailers, this means your ecommerce pages! Product pages receive a large majority of web traffic to a website. Capitalize on this by converting regular product pages into ecommerce landing pages! Instead of showing an error, that will almost always cause a page bounce, provide some excellent suggestions to your customers and encouraging them to click through your site and increase your chances of gaining a new customer.
In Conclusion
If you want to get the most out of your site and give your customers a great user experience, it is important to get a more complete analytical view of your web site. Don’t focus on just one or two pages on your site. Remember every page on your site has the potential of driving visits to your site and profits to your business.