According to Jonathan Mendez placing widgets on landing Pages might be a solution to low conversion rates for generic keyword phrases such as "house plans", "home plans", "floor plans", or any other generalized phase that can drive a lot of traffic, if you rank well for it, but not much in the way of results.
"...Most landing pages I see from generic queries take users to homepages or category pages. There is a better solution. You have to build it, but the returns I've seen can be well worth it. Creating APIs or leveraging existing APIs can create powerfully relevant landing pages. When the content becomes free from the hierarchy and navigational structure of your site, it allows new delivery rules to be created that more relevantly align the content with the goals of your visitor.
These types of landings are highly optimized. The change in user experience and performance can be dramatic. Sending your visitors to a comfortable LAP (Landing Application Page) provides the ability to keep users in the flow and focused on their goal. These solutions work because they pick up on the generic nature of the query by providing an immediate ability to refine and target the user with content that is only contextually relevant. LAPs can also contain multiple dynamic conversion paths. Similar to static landing pages, the presentation and delivery of the content can be multivariate and split tested. The clearest example of the benefits of Landing Application Page is Google's Universal Search. "
Jonathan Mendez cites his own blogs FeedBurner Stats in a post titled - Widgets, Landing Pages and Feed Stats - to illustrate that putting Widgets on his blog directly affected his RSS Subscriber rates.
I was thinking this might be the way to go for sites where the conversion rates are pretty low to begin with - but that I realized that it's been pretty hard to get most of my clients to do much of anything, really, and I wonder how easy it would be to get a website to function as a platform.
Sounds like this is worth looking into more, though.
Hi Marshall,
I wasn't actually trying to make any correlation b/w landing page widgets and my blog feed numbers however your enlightened thinking brings up a terrific point.
As you point out the many blog feed sub links are merely a collection of widgets -- each speaking to the same ulitmate goal (RSS sub) but allowing easy refinement based on preference -- what feed reader you have or content you are interested in.
Brilliant!
Cheers,
Jonathan
Posted by: Jonathan Mendez | October 12, 2007 7:12 AM | Permalink to Comment