Yup, you need those landing pages believe it or not. And no, these are not the landing pages you created specifically so that you can capture an email adress when someone clicks your Google PPC ads.
There is more to it now than that, especially for SEO, which means better organic rankings.
According to Sam Niccolls of SEOmozBlog, many businesses, even established ones, still think their only way to organic listings is through the homepage.
This could not be further from the truth. It’s OK if not all your visitors go through the homepage of your site; most SEO experts would even say most should NOT automatically go to the homepage if you have optimized your site well.
So what are these organic landing pages then? Well, you can find this out by researching which pages other than your homepage are getting the visitors straight off the search engines (Goole Analytics is free and will give you this extremely useful data). Optimize those pages for the appropriate keywords (find the keywords by using a free tool, like the one from Google).
A hypothetical situation provides a good example of why this is important, and how it can help you convert leads and reduce bounce rates: I do an internet search for “Winter boots.” I choose Macy’s from the organic listings, and it takes me to the Macy’s homepage. THEN I have to search for “Winter boots” again on the Macy’s site…or I may just get frustrated and leave completely. A landing page in this case could have been the “Shoes” homepage, optimized for “winter boots” (along with other keywords, and could be changed seasonally to match the types of shoes people search for).
This is the value of landing pages. It’s not difficult and it will mean a more specified, higher quality experience for your visitors. It should also improve your organic search rankings because you are even more relevant to the searches.