Landing pages explained more, and Ad landing pages need inlink from the webiste they promote?

Question

After reading here what's a landing page is and some other articles i understood there are 2 types of landing pages, the Ad ones for commercial and the SEO ones.

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AD (COMMERCIAL) LANDING PAGES

In my understanding the Commercial/Ad landing page is created mainly to have a commercial Ad (like AdWords on Google) to link directly to such landing page. This landing pages are supposed to be in some way tailored to the text of the Google Ad and designed in order to trigger user action.

An example could be a website that sells gold, silver and copper medals. A Google Ad that says: "Buy silver medal" and links to landing page that shows more specifically the silver medals (rather than all medals) and maybe some promotional offer with a big "Buy Now" button.

The advantages of creating this type of landing page is that a user who was interested in the "Buy silver medal" advertisement and clicked on it, was probably more willing to buy something if he LANDS on a page talking specifically about silver medals, rather than landing on the website HOME PAGE that shows up all sort of medals and NOT specifically the silver ones.

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SEO LANDING PAGES

Still in my understanding, on the other side, the SEO landing pages are supposed to be in very simple terms pages with some sort of interesting contents (that maybe also insists on some key phrases) in order to bring attention and reputation from the WWW to that page and indirectly to your website.

Reputation and interest to the SEO landing page is mainly generated because many people are gonna link to that page or talk about it in forums, blogs,twitter, etc

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My questions are:

1. Did I understood the differences between the two type of landing pages?

2. Are Ad (Commercial) landing pages supposed to have an inbound link from the website they promote? I would say no cause there is no reason to give any sort of reputation to these type of pages, and we would also lose the ability to see how many visitors arrived on my website from the landing page (in other words how many visitors arrived on my website from the Ad campaigns). I would not even make Ad landing pages being indexed by search engines, in this way by counting the visits to the landing page I have a better approximation of the results of my Ad campaign.

Answer 1

1. I think you understand the difference very well.
2. In general it is better to get sales than to make things so "clean." What I mean by that is that you might not want to link from your main site to the landing page so PageRank flows to it but I would see no reason not to let the search engines crawl your landing page. Any extra traffic is a good thing. If the concern is tracking how much money you ad campaign is making, remember it is always easy enough to add tracking to your landing page through Google that will allow you to see what percentage of people are buying from the ads and what percentage are just coming straight from SERP.

Answer 2

To answer your first question, yes, but there isn't always such a clear distinction. Every page on your website should be viewed as a landing page because every page should have a specific purpose for existing, i.e. what you want the user to do. The difference lies in what that purpose is.

It's a good practice to tailor your page to where you think your visitors will be coming from.

For ad campaigns, you should be careful to match the ad text, offer, and expectations to what is actually on the landing page. You'll convert a higher percentage of visitors this way. And you're right, your commercial landing pages should be as specific as possible. What's more, you should get rid of anything that isn't relevant to the offer at hand as it can cause a distraction.

As to your second question, you don't have to link to these pages, but if they convert well, I don't see a reason why you shouldn't as long as you have an analytics program that can tell you where your visitors are coming from. (Note: you can synch Google Adwords and Analytics together.) You can certainly create a commercial landing page that is optimized for SEO. In fact, I would encourage it because it means less work than creating two.

The same principle of matching the title (and description) text, offer, and promise to the page also applies to SEO (and social media). Not that it necessarily helps your rankings, but it will help your conversion rates, which is even more important. It's important not to lose sight of the page's purpose while trying to optimize for SEO. Should you include your keywords in your title? Yes, but the trick is doing it in a way that will make the user click to go to your page.

Once a visitor is on your page, whether it's commercial or not, you want them to do something specific. The page's responsibility should be to convert your visitor by getting them to perform whatever action you want them to do: buy something, subscribe to an email list, register to your site, leave a comment, contact you, etc. This is called a primary call to action and it should be your first priority.

The best converting landing pages occur when a user's primary goal and the page's primary call to action are the same.

You can also have secondary calls to action. These should be related to the primary call to action, but represent less of a commitment. For example, if your primary call is to buy a widget, your secondary call could be to find out more about the widget's feature or to see a pricing plan.

As a summary, all pages should be viewed as a landing page. When creating a page it's important to always think about both what you want the user to do and what the user wants to do. Try to find ways to align those priorities. Clear away any distractions from every page. Finally, always keep in mind why a user is coming to your page and try to match those expectations.