How Retailers Can Drive More Traffic With Landing Pages

Think one of your biggest retail marketing priorities should be managing your social media? Think again.

According to research from BrightEdge in 2019, organic search reigns supreme as the top source of tracked web traffic, driving 53% of all web traffic. Yep — that's more than half of all traffic coming from search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, compared to just 5% of web traffic coming from organic social media.

That means that SEO deserves 10x the attention you give to your social media channels if you're looking to convert eyeballs to purchases.

When someone researches your products in a search engine and clicks your result, you don't want to send them to your home page and hope they find their way to check out. You need to direct them to landing pages that quickly answer their questions and expedite the time to make a purchase.

A well-marked-up landing page designed for high-intent searches can do just that.

What is intent?

Intent is the magical moment in the marketing funnel where a consumer is getting ready to make a purchase. Intent marketing is the art and science of capturing that intent and turning it into revenue for your business.

These almost-customers are well past the moment where they're researching your brand or products, and their hands are hovering over their (virtual or physical) wallet. Intent means it's "go time" for retailers because intent is the difference between someone searching for "beginner running tips" (low purchase intent) and "running shoe stores open now" or "size 10 women's running shoes near me" (high purchase intent).

Their readiness to buy is why it's so crucial to send someone to the right virtual destination when they look for you in a Google search.

What are landing pages that are optimised for intent?

When we say landing pages that are "optimised for intent," we are talking about a type of landing page specifically designed to meet user intent in search. When someone is "high-intent," they're somewhere in between having 19 of your competitors' websites open in other tabs and clicking "buy" on your website or visiting your store. All they need is to have the path in front of them cleared of clutter. Here's where landing pages come in.

To capture high-intent traffic, retailers can customise landing pages for these potentially high-value website visitors that give them exactly what they're looking for. A great landing page answers someone's search query immediately and makes it as easy as possible for them to get what they're looking for.

Put another way, your landing pages should know how to make friends with the robots who crawl your website whenever people search for something you offer. Web crawlers need to know you're the right business for the job; schema markup helps them figure that out quickly.

"When a site has schema markup, search engines can 'read' and pull from the pages — and users can see the relevant information from the page right in the search engine results page (SERP)," explains Derick Jaros, Head of Industry for Commerce at Yext. "It's one important part of the package: you need properly marked up pages — with high page speed, relevant content, and that work in tandem with well-placed ads. When you have all of this on high-intent landing pages, that's what will boost your overall sales results."

Though you can DIY this markup on your own, you can also use a landing page builder specifically designed for search intent that makes the task a whole lot simpler.

How do landing pages help retailers drive more traffic?

Ranking in the top position in search — that is, coming up first when someone searches for a term related to your business — is as important as it sounds. Results in the top spot get a 43% click-through rate, compared to 37% for the second result and just 30% for the third.

The dropoff in click-throughs for results below the top three (called "three-packs") drops off sharply, so it's crucial to get your brand in the top three results to guarantee the most clicks possible.

You can only capture that traffic with a search-optimised landing page mapped to each popular search term you're targeting.

For example, for retailers, a custom product detail landing page or product category page designed specifically for search may be just what your audience needs to hit "buy."

For brick-and-mortar retailers, searchers will want to know your store hours, what's in stock, and how to get there, or they won't pay you a visit — according to Shopify research, 81% of surveyed consumers say being able to easily find a local retailer through searching online is important to them.

Last but not least: don't forget that page speed is of critical importance to conversion. When you have intent-optimised landing pages allowing you to capture more traffic, you can help bring customers through the final mile with faster site speeds. Research shows that a site that loads in 1 second has a conversion rate 3x higher than a site that loads in 5 seconds.

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Get started with landing pages

Creating great search landing pages requires a few key building blocks. You'll need:

• A landing page builder that's easy for your whole team to use (but makes your developers happy too).
• Great markup features to rank higher in search.
• The ability to update those pages often without asking someone to do it for you.

Skincare retailer Kiehls partnered with Yext to convert more high-intent traffic, with great results: Since launching with Yext, with Yext Pages, Kiehl's has driven over 157k clicks captured from over 3.7k different queries.

Build your own ridiculously fast landing pages with Yext by kicking off a demo here, or you can keep learning about intent marketing by grabbing a free copy of The Complete Guide to Intent Marketing.