Are your landing pages as effective as you want them to be?
As a website/business owner, this is a question that you should be asking yourself on a regular basis but how often do you actually take action and optimize your pages? Your landing pages are such an essential point of your sales funnel, and if they’re not optimized to their greatest potential, you’ll suffer high bounce rates, low conversion rates, and wasteful PPC campaigns.
However, taking action on this matter isn’t as daunting as you might think. Today, I’m going to talk you through ten essential landing page optimization tips, enabling you to boost your conversion rates while simultaneously enhancing your ROI.
Find Your Foundations
The first thing you need to do and need to be doing is analyzing the current performance of your landing pages. It’s impossible for you to start improving your pages, or even knowing how successful they currently are, without analyzing your current statistics.
Whatever your hosting platform or framework is that you’re using, they’ll be a way to see exactly how many are coming to your landing pages, how many are converting and how many are bouncing off onto other websites.
You’ll also be able to see where these internet users are coming from, allowing you to judge the effectiveness of your social media and PPC campaigns. If you’re not currently using some form of analytical software, I highly recommend signing your web pages up to Google Analytics.
With this analytics in mind, you’ll be able to see just how well your pages are performing, enabling you to create realistic targets for how you want your landing pages to perform and so you have something to aim for.
Test Your Landing Pages
Next, you’re going to want to make sure that your landing pages are optimized and effective in the eyes of your users. Of course, depending on how busy you’ve been, you’ll probably have several landing pages that you operate.
You’ll need to test these landing pages using a method known as split testing, more commonly referred to as A/B testing. Ideally, you want to do this to two identical pages with a slight yet significant change on each, but you’re more than welcome to use two existing landing pages to see which people prefer.
You can set this up so half of your online user’s land on one landing page and the other half land on another. This way you can see which is the most effective. Of course, this works much better if you’re using two identical landing pages with the change.
For example, you could change the imagery used on one page or a different color scheme. You could also try changing the text content of your page. A/B testing is a continuous process that you’ll continuingly engage in, consistently updating and optimizing your pages as the months go by.
Even if you’re seeing a slight increase of 1-10% in your conversion rate, over time, this will build up to an optimal conversion rate.
Implement Video Content
Nowadays, the internet has never been more accessible and with speeds, both for desktop and mobile devices, becoming faster than ever before, implementing HD video media into your landing pages is now a viable marketing technique.
After all, it’s worth remembering that video content is one of the most popular forms of media, so what better way to give your users something they love. Another great technique is implementing influencer marketing into your landing pages.
Of course, implementing video content solely depends on the nature of your business and the products you’re trying to sell, but if you get creative, there are so many options open to you.
Using Exit-Induced Pop-Ups
Of course, while we may go about the internet and disregard many of those pop-ups that appear when we go to leave a page, they are still used for a reason, and you’ll still see them implemented on so many websites, both big and small.
This is because they are effective, and people do respond to them. However, you need to make sure that you’re using them correctly and effectively. The most important point here is to not ruin your user experience by having it pop up while people are looking at your content, but when they go to leave.
Then, there are two ways you can use these pop-up boxes.
Firstly, you can repeat your original offer. Sometimes, repetition is all you need and seeing your offer come up on the screen can be enough to get people clicking. Alternatively, you can offer a secondary offer, perhaps a lower price than originally attending, getting more people to think they are getting a better deal.
Work on Your Written Content
Landing pages are renowned for being highly visual pages traditionally, but it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll have text in place. However, when was the last time you considered how effective this text is in helping you secure a sale?
When it comes your landing page’s copywriting, look to make sure that you’re communicating the message that you want to communicate. Likewise, you’ll want to make sure that your content is accurate and free from mistakes, such as poor spelling, poor grammar, and misplaced punctuation. Otherwise, you’ll damage the credibility and reputation of your business
Below, you’ll find a list of tools that you can use to help you perfect the written content of your landing pages;
Grammarly
This is an online grammar checker you can use to perfect your grammar.
Australian Reviewer
This is a professional content writing tool you can use to acquire content for your landing pages.
Easy Word Count
This free online tool allows you to track your word count, so your content is not too long or too short and invaluable.
UK Top Writers
A content editing tool to help you make sure that your content is communicating the right message.
Top Canadian Writers
This is a professional proofreading service to make sure your content is free from errors.
Include Social Proof
Reviews are so important these days, and customers want to see what other people have thought about your product before purchasing it for themselves. If you’ve already sold some products, make sure that you’re asking them for reviews so you can post these on your landing pages.
This a great way to build credibility in your products and your landing pages and is a sure-fire way to boost your conversion rates.
Be a Secure Website
Online security is more important today than it ever has been before and therefore it’s so important that you provide the security level that your users expect on your landing pages. Make sure you have an up-to-date SSL certificate at the very minimum.
If you want to take things a step further, you can include a section of your text which shares the level of security and trust that your landing pages offer your customers. You may always want to include a customer service email or phone number, so people can get in contact if they have any doubts.
Consider SEO
SEO is so important when it comes to the success of your landing pages. Otherwise, people aren’t going to be coming to your website because they won’t be able to find it! This means you’ll need to take into consideration the keywords you’ve used on your landing pages and the effectiveness of your H1 and H2 headers.
Another crucial thing you’ll want to remember is the fact that people are using voice searches more and more which brings us to ‘key phrases’. Let’s say you have a landing page that sells running trainers.
“Internet users are far more likely to use voice search for queries such as ‘what are the best running trainers for 2018’. Of course, this depends on your business but including a handful of these key phrases can help to boost your inline visibility dramatically” shares Ian Dunham, an SEO manager for Revieweal.
Check Your Call to Action
The most important element you’ll have on your landing page is the call to action (CTA). Without a clear CTA, an online user is not going to know where to click or how to make their purchase, resulting in them becoming confused and bouncing off your page.
Be sure to make your CTA stand out from the rest of your page and consider the text that is written on your CTA button. This is a great element to A/B test when optimizing your landing pages.
A RESPONSIVE PAGE!
This is one consideration that you should already know about, but it’s surprising how many landing pages still haven’t implemented. Over half of all internet traffic is now on mobile devices so if people are coming to your landing page and your website isn’t optimized; they’ll simply leave.
Make sure that your landing pages and all its content is optimized for mobile devices and gives your readers the best experience possible, maximizing your conversion rates while minimizing your bounce rates.
Summary
As you can see, there are many things you can do and many elements of your landing pages to consider when it comes to making them perform optimally. Every landing page is different, and there’s so much you can do with them, all you need to do is think creatively and matching the needs of your target market.