“Do you have what I want? Why should I get it from you?” These questions, posed by Tim Ash in his book Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions? are refrains constantly repeated across the breadth of the internet.
As users arrive on various website landing pages by the billions, typically their initial goal is to see if they’ve found what they were looking for. If the answer seems to be yes, it initiates a cycle of further research. If it appears to be no, it leads to a dreaded bounce back to the search engine that brought them to your site.
Whether you’re struggling with high bounce rates and failing to convert traffic into sales, here are a few top tips to help you optimize your landing pages for ultimate conversions.
Identify the Goal of Each Landing Page
The first thing that you should do with each landing page is to identify what it is trying to accomplish. After all, if you can’t answer this question quickly and clearly, how will a visitor be able to do so?
Is the landing page attempting to provide quality information? Answering a common question? Is it the top of a sales funnel? Each landing page should have a clearly defined purpose before you begin optimizing it for incoming traffic.
Create User-Focused Content
It’s tempting to focus your website copy on search engine optimization (SEO). After all, garnering search engine results page (SERP) traffic from a coveted keyword can be extremely rewarding. However, if you’re getting loads of traffic but every visitor takes a glance around and decides the landing page doesn’t answer their question. Chances are you’ve got your priorities mixed up a bit.
Do not focuse on search engines only. Every page on your site, including your landing pages, should be optimized with the reader in mind. Put yourself in their shoes. Ask the questions that they would be asking. Make sure that your landing page is optimized to best meet the needs of your average visitor.
Know Your Customers
Laying out a landing page for customers can be a tricky business. Especially if you haven’t quite identified your customers yet. In order to optimise each landing page correctly, take the time to study your customers beforehand.
The best way to do this is by creating a semi-fictional buyer persona that best exemplifies your ideal customer. This can help to guide your decisions when it comes to creating copy, laying out pages, and so on. All you need to do is slip into the shoes of your ideal customer and consider how they would handle each situation.
Once you are done optimizing your page for the average customer, you can also take the concept even further. By personalizing the page itself, based on information from the arriving customer, as is the case with geo-targeting.
Marry Each Page’s Layout with Real Copy
It’s tempting to toss some Lorem Ipsum onto a landing page, get things laid out, and then backfill the text once it’s ready. Hit publish, and you’re all set, right? Except, if you’re truly optimizing each landing page, a “layout first, add text later” approach doesn’t always work.
The problem? The final text hardly ever precisely fits the space occupied by the Lorem Ipsum. As text comes up short or spills over, it can throw off the layout. Especially in a responsive design where the blocks of the page will be shifting around depending on the size of the screen.
If you want to have control over the optimization of your page, make sure to lay things out with the final text itself. That way you can make sure everything fits where it’s supposed to in all formats.
Navigation is a key element of every website. Without clear navigation, visitors will quickly depart your site in frustration. However, when it comes to navigation on a landing page, you may want to hold off before you include that comprehensive, well-thought-out menu from your home page.
SEO guru Neil Patel suggests that landing pages “shouldn’t have your usual site navigation”. Instead, he advises that you provide a single call to action above the fold and possibly one more option to access further information. The CTA — a landing page “must-have” — should always be above the fold (ideally as high as possible). In case the content is long, it should be repeated at the bottom of the page to reward readers who scroll.
A focus on limited navigation options and well-placed CTAs can go a long way in streamlining your landing pages by offering each visitor the basic information that they’re looking for to help them pursue your offered solution further.
Stay Clean and Simple
One of the simplest yet critical aspects of a good landing page is keeping it clean and simple. If a page is cluttered with too many images, a barrage of text, or multiple navigation options, it can quickly defeat the purpose of prompting a consumer to go in a specific direction in search of an answer.
If you are optimizing your landing pages, make sure to comb over each one to:
- Remove unnecessary bells and whistles.
- Make sure the colors are simple and attractive.
- Keep those CTAs as high as possible.
- Optimize images to keep them small-yet-effective.
One of the added benefits of creating a clean, minimalistic landing page is that it naturally reduces your loading speed.
Nearly half of consumers expect a web page to load in a blistering 2 seconds or less whereas. In reality, the average time to fully load a page tends to be 10.3 seconds on a desktop and a staggering 27.3 seconds on a mobile phone.
In other words, the less information to load, the better.
Be Minimal with Information Requests
Personal privacy, cybersecurity, and data protection are increasingly important to the modern consumer. With that in mind, always be careful to take steps to provide a sense of security from the moment someone arrives on your site.
Set up HTTPS web pages to create a secure website. Avoid asking for unnecessary information if you include any forms on your landing pages. Whenever you go to ask for customer information, put yourself in that customer persona mindset. Consider how you would feel if you were asked to provide the same information on a site you’d never seen before.
Always Test Your Pages
As you go through the process of optimizing each landing page, it’s also important to equip yourself with the tools to both assess and test each page. Fortunately, the number of tools available to track your progress is legion. For example:
- An app like Google Pagespeed Insights can help you see loading time.
- SEO Site Checkup can help you identify where your SEO can be improved.
- Google Analytics can provide valuable information regarding things like visitor count, PPC traffic, and bounce rate.
As you prepare to optimize each page, make sure to have the right tools ready to hand.
Optimizing Your Landing Pages with Conversions in Mind
There are many ways to optimize each landing page on your site. This should always be treated as more than a simple clean up routine. Landing page optimizing is one of the most critical steps between getting organic traffic and converting that traffic into a sale.
If you don’t have a well-thought-out landing page in place to receive traffic, you’ll waste all of the time, effort, and resources that you put into getting that traffic in the first place.
So go over each landing page. Identify what you’re specifically trying to accomplish with each one, and then apply the above tips to ensure that your site is ready to receive visitors. Help them find precisely what they’re looking for: your solutions.
