Increase Your Conversion Rates with Landing Page Optimization
Post on June 17th, 2008
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Whether you are running pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, other paid advertising, or relying on organic search engine rankings, these tips on optimizing your landing pages will help you to achieve higher conversion rates on your website.
Are you getting traffic to your web site, but finding that visitors are not taking any action? The following suggestions will have you on your way to optimizing your landing page(s) thus, improving your conversion rates:
1. Focus your Landing Pages
Your landing pages should have one offer that you focus on in order to achieve higher conversion rates. If your visitors land on a page where there are many options, with many calls-to-action and paths they can take through your site, you are only losing focused attention on the primary goal. Whether your conversion is completing a lead form, making a purchase, or signing up for a newsletter or membership, make this the main intent of your page. Give your visitors too many choices, and you run a high risk of losing them. This term is called “abandonment”. Abandonment is when your visitors initiate an action, but do not follow through. Look at your landing pages, and identify potential “abandonment points”, and remedy the situation by eliminating them.
2. Present a Clear Call-to-Action
Tell your visitors what you want them to do. If someone is looking at your page, and you have their attention, compel them to take action. Let’s say, as an example, you are an investment broker, and you are looking to attract more clients. You should have a clear call-to-action that makes the user want to proceed, such as “Start Getting Better Returns Now”. As an additional point, you should have only one call to action on the page. In some instances there may be two, such as “Download Now”, vs. “Start your Free Trial Now”. Your one, clear, concise call-to-action should stand out on the page visually. You can do this through different text treatments or better yet, a nice, clean button.
3. Summarize Your Offer
People scan web pages, and decide very quickly whether or not their interest is piqued. Keep your body copy brief - bullet points of the key benefits of your product/offer are the easiest to read. If you need to explain further, summarize as much as possible, trying to have only one to two paragraphs of text on the page. The most important content is that which solves a problem or lets the user know “what’s in it for them”. Try to stay away from sing a lot of “marketing fluff”, and make the best use of all of the words you choose to use on the page.
4. Test, Analyze, Repeat
By A/B testing, you can narrow down what works and what doesn’t with your landing pages. A/B testing is running two landing pages against each other which have minor differences, and then measuring which one converts better. The differences should be minor, and changes that you make can be one of the following: call-to-action text, heading on the page, position of the form (right side vs. left side), bulleted copy on the page, even little changes can make a difference in landing pages, such as the color of the call-to-action button. Make one change at a time, and before you know it, you will end up with great improvements in your conversion rates.
5. Keep Copy and Keywords Consistent
If you are utilizing pay-per-click, link-building, or other contextual methods of bringing traffic to your landing pages, make sure that the ad creative copy is consistent with what the user will get when they come to the landing page. The bait and switch is not a good technique, and if visitors reach your landing page thinking that they are getting one thing, and then see something different, chances are they will bounce very quickly. Try to use the same calls-to-action as in your ad creative to give more consistency to your campaign. This also will save you from spending money on clicks from a PPC campaign that will be wasted.
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