2-step landing pages

Search Engine Land just published a new post of ours, Segmenting Search Respondents With 2-Step Landing Pages. The article, which is a follow-up to our previous post about audience segmentation optimization, explains how search marketers can use segmentation choices on their landing pages to disambiguate traffic from more generic search keywords.

By subsequently targeting the right content to the right audience, based on that choice, marketers can increase their conversion rate and learn more about their audience, earlier in the funnel.

Some old-school search marketers may object to this 2-step landing page methodology on principle, in the [mistaken] belief that respondents don’t like to click. If you ask people to take an extra step, you will lose more of them, so conventional wisdom goes.

However, that’s not necessarily true. Fewer steps may be better — other things being equal. But other things rarely are.

The underlying dynamic here is that respondents don’t like to waste time or effort. If an extra click actually saves them time, by quickly navigating them to the content that’s most relevant to their needs — if you can properly set those expectations and then fulfill them — many will indeed make that click.

It’s about keeping people in a flow that serves their interests.