The first generation of thinking on this subject was to take visitors not to the home page but to adeeply-embedded page on the site that was more relevant to the search phrase. For example, a search for “laser hair removal” on Google could be sent to a product page talking more in-depth about laser hair removal. This worked. Typically, onsite conversion rates were 30-50% higher than sending people just to the home page.
They had flaws. This deep-link page actually has 2 sorts of audience now so needs to be designed to deal with both. The first type of visitor is the one that arrives directly from a PPC campaign, the second type is someone who has wandered around the site and found the page themselves.
Quite clearly, these two different audiences need two different styles of writing, content and actions. This mean’t creating pages that couldn’t have a focus on one type of visitor. The deep-link page was the first exposure for first-time visitors, the first time to impress them (5 seconds?) and stop them hitting [BackSpace] whilst for seasoned browsers they were well into the site and be prepared to give more time and effort to read the contents.
