If you advertise your home performance business in the local paper, or with pay-per-click campaigns, or if you're featured on a state or utility program website, it's a great idea to utilize something called a landing page when directing people to your website. Sending your visitors to a landing page instead of your home page allows you to give them, upfront, the specific information that they're looking for, and allows you to capture leads more effectively than your home page.
Essentially, it's a page on your website that isn't visible to the public unless they have the link. So you can't navigate to it from your home page, they typically don't show up in search results, but it's highly effective when visitors are directed to it because you know where they're coming from and what they're looking for. (While the home page needs to serve a lot of functions simultaneously, a landing page only needs to do one thing for one audience.)
A few tips for an effective landing page:
A highly visible call to action.
It's important that you give visitors the information that they're looking for upfront, and, since there's typically "buying intent" when visitors go to a landing page, it's important that you make it easy for them to contact you. Consider adding a contact form or a prominent link to your contact page, or a highly visible phone number with some action-oriented text (e.g., "Call us today to schedule a home energy audit.")
Branding.
Make sure your company's logo is highly visible, so your visitors know who they're dealing with; but also be sure to use a logo affiliated with the program that you're participating in or the offer that the landing page is affiliated with. (For example, an Efficiency Maine participating contractor would want to include the Efficiency Maine logo on an Efficiency Maine landing page, so visitors know they're in the right place to find what they're looking for.)
Keep it relevant.
With the knowledge that your visitor has been somewhere else, and landed on your site, can you be reasonably certain that they'll feel comfortable? Do they know they're in the right place? For example, if a potential customer were on the Energy Upgrade California website, and got to your landing page from a link there, are you making it absolutely clear that yes, you are affiliated with Energy Upgrade California? If there's any hesitation here, you'll lose visitors and you'll lose business.
KISS (Keep It Simple, Sweetheart).
Typically, when visitors get to a landing page, they're ready to do something. They probably don't want to read a whole lot (more than they have to), or look through an image gallery of pretty pictures. Keep your text concise and action-oriented, and you'll increase chances of conversion.
Here's an example:
The other magically delicious thing about landing pages is this: they enable closed loop tracking of your marketing efforts. When you dedicate a particular page to, say, an online ad, you will know exactly how much traffic the ad generated and, more importantly, whether that traffic "converted." Conversion, in most cases, is the completion of a form so you can capture the lead, qualify it and move it through your sales process.