What your visitors see when they arrive on your site can make the world of difference in the results your advertising produces. Congruency in the message and the path in which you lead the visitor as well as how that message is delivered can make or break a campaign.
Getting everything you can out of the landing pages you advertise is crucial so in this article, we are going to discuss the top 5 surefire landing page optimization tips to increase your conversions.
In the purest sense of the definition, a landing page is any web page that a visitor “lands” on. However, when discussing landing pages in relation to marketing and advertising, it’s more common to refer to a landing page as being a distinct standalone page that serves the purpose of a single focused objective.
Whether your landing pages are used to create free trials, accept demo requests, generate leads or whatever… They serve a specific purpose and that purpose is to get visitors to take a specific desired action.
So What Are The Top 5 Landing Page Optimization Tips?
As mentioned your landing pages should be designed with a specific objective in mind. After having critiquing hundreds of landing pages and optimizing about as many here are our best landing page optimization tips.
1. Clear concise goal
When a visitor arrives on your landing page they are typically in search of ONE thing. Something caused them to seek a solution, your ad caught there attention, so your landing page should deliver the solution advertised.
The biggest mistake you can make on your landing pages is to try to give too much information or try to lead your visitors in more than one path.
The landing page should be designed with one clear and concise goal. If the main purpose is to have a visitor sign up for a free trial, do whatever you can to take the visitor down the path to sign up for the trial. Don’t try to get them to take a trial and then give them the option to also contact you, or schedule a demo. More than one option can add friction and really muddy up the user experience on the page. If you have been following our blog for any period of time you know how much we hate “friction” onsite.
If you get ONE thing out of these landing page optimization tips it should be this one. We have seen tests show up to 80% improvement by simply focusing on one goal. There is a reason it is number one on the list.
Make sure your landing page serves one purpose and one purpose only.
2. Benefit driven headline
We hate to beat a dead horse here but we simply can’t emphasize how important headlines are specifically how important they are on landing pages.
Number two on our list of landing page optimization tips is making sure you have a benefit-driven headline.
The headline is usually the first thing visitors see when arriving on your landing page. Having a weak or, in some cases, non-existent headline will surely cause your conversions to suffer. Multiple tests have shown 30% to even as high as 150% improvement from changing the headline alone.
To give you some guidance on a good headline be sure to check out our article on headline templates here.
Make sure your headline is highly visible, is benefit-driven, and grabs the visitors attention.
3. A clear call to action
Remember the purpose of our landing pages is to get the visitors down one specific path to the desired goal. Just because you have a form clearly visible on a page don’t assume your visitors know what to do next. By simply telling them what you want to do next and the result they are going to get by doing it can dramatically increase your conversion rates.
Even a couple changes to how your call to action is worded can yield big benefits as you can see in this case study where such small changes increased free account signups for one company 158%.
Make sure you aren’t assuming and you are telling your visitors where to go next.
4. Visible action item
Number 4 on our list of top landing page optimization tips has to do with calls to action. If your goal is to have a visitor fill out a form on the page or even click a button make sure the path is clearly visible on the page. If your eyes aren’t immediately drawn to that as well as your headline when looking at the page you may want to think about adding some contrast.
For example, if the main colors on your site are blue, it doesn’t make sense to have the buttons on the landing page be blue as well. Add some contrast. If you take a look at our site, for example, our main colors as you can see are blue but all the buttons are green. We have tested this to be the most effective contrast.
You can also look at putting your forms within their own box that has a different background color than the rest of the page. This adds some of the above-mentioned contrast and can help draw the eyes to where you want the visitor to go next and what action you want them to take.
5. Maximize above the fold of the page
Number 5 on our list of landing page optimization tips is making sure you take advantage of the most valuable onsite real estate you have, above the fold of the page. “Above the fold” simply means the visible area the visitor sees without having to scroll down on the page.
Many studies have shown that marketing messages dilute the further a visitor has to scroll on a page. The more you can take advantage of this valuable area on the page the better your conversions are going to be. To see what we are talking about, take a look at some heat/click map data from just about any site out there and you can see that engagement falls off the further down the page they scroll.
Make sure your headline, benefits, call to action, and desired next step are all listed above the fold. To add some fuel to the fire you can also add some “proof” elements such as testimonials, media mentions, or awards you have won up there as well.
There you have it, 5 surefire landing page optimization tips for higher conversions.
Things to test…
- Different headlines
- Turn paragraphs into benefit driven bullets
- Test images
- Colors and font sizes
- Add proof to the page
- Try testing your phone number in the header
- Test having a top menu bar or not (you may be surprised at the results here)
- Placement of your call to action (eg left vs right)
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If you need help with your landing pages and would like a no-obligation critique of your existing pages, feel free to reach out as we are happy to help.