Landing pages are an integral part of building a successful website and paid media strategies. If you don’t have optimized landing pages, then you will miss out on a lot of website visitors, leads, and conversions. A lot of companies put landing pages on the backburner compared to their home page content and more popular pages. This mindset can be detrimental if you ever want to interest new clients and increase website traffic. It doesn’t have to be hard to build successful landing pages. Keep reading for 10 tips to help you optimize your landing pages and get more conversions.
What is a Landing Page?
A landing page refers to the page that a consumer will arrive at or “land” on when they click on your website from the search results page or other paid media. If you search for “Hubspot vs Salesforce” on Google, an ad from Hubspot will appear. When you click on the ad, you are taken to a landing page that compares Hubspot and Salesforce. The landing page explains why Hubspot thinks they are better than Salesforce. Oftentimes landing pages are linked to search or social media ads, but they don’t have to be. You can rank organically by optimizing your pages, or you can share pages on social media or in an email.
Why are Landing Pages So Important?
Good landing pages will increase your website traffic which will result in an increase in the number of website conversions you receive. If you don’t have strong, concise landing pages, then you can expect your bounce rate to increase, and website visitors and conversions to decrease. In addition, if a website visitor is not satisfied with your website the first time they visit, there is a good chance they will not return. The good thing is, we have built this list of 10 tips to help you optimize your landing pages, so keep reading!
1. Understand Your Sales Funnel
Landing pages can be one of the first points of interaction your prospects have with your company. This is important to understand because it’s likely that prospects that are coming to your website for the first time will not convert. In fact, 98% of website visitors do not convert. It can be discouraging to see so many new website visitors, but very few conversions. This is normal, and understanding how your customers flow through your sales funnel can help you shorten the time it takes to convert them into paying customers. If you want more information on how to understand your sales funnel, take a look at this article here. By understanding your sales funnel, you’ll be able to optimize your landing pages for conversions.
2. Keywords
Using relevant keywords on your landing pages will help your page rank higher in the search engine’s algorithm. Before you create new landing pages, you should do keyword research using Google Keyword Planner. Type in words that you think you would want to rank for and see the most popular search terms. Once you have an idea for a keyword, create a new webpage with that keyword in mind.
Below is an example of one of our landing pages, where we have used “IP Address to Company Name” as our keyword. You can see that we have mentioned it a few times in titles and text. We also include it in our metadata to ensure we rank on search engines. By including all of this information, our website visitors will know exactly what the page is about and hopefully want to learn more. Keep in mind that search engines can penalize your website if you are “keyword stuffing”. This means you are using too many keywords in hopes of trying to rank better. A good rule of thumb is to include a max of 1-3 keywords per 100 words.
3. Prioritize Landing Page Information
Unfortunately, there’s a good chance your website visitors will not read the entire landing page. So, it’s important to have the most important information at the top of the page, above the fold. Above the fold means they do not have to scroll down to see important information. Looking at the example above, we have included a relevant title, a paragraph explaining how we can solve our visitor’s problems, and a call to action. Further down the page is more in-depth details like use cases, pricing, case studies, and more. It’s important to frame your pages like this so it’s easy for visitors to understand your company in the first few sentences that they read. Then, they will understand what your company does as soon as they land on the page. Plus, they will be more likely to scroll down to keep reading if you were able to catch their attention.
4. Align Your Ads
Far too often I see ads that are for one topic, but the landing page is for a different topic. This is confusing and annoying for website visitors, which will lead to a high bounce rate. For example, if you have a competitor comparison ad, but a generalized landing page, your visitor might get frustrated because they wanted to see a comparison of your company and your competitor to help them choose. When creating the ad, you want to use the same keyword and close variations of the keywords in your ad that you have used in your landing pages. Then, ensure your content aligns with the keywords that you’re focusing on. You should also use a URL name that represents what the visitor should expect to see on the page.
5. A/B Testing
Just like any other form of marketing, A/B testing can provide a lot of insight into your tactics. Even simple changes to a call to action can drastically improve your conversion rate. My suggestion would be to create and launch a campaign with a landing page, and run that campaign for at least a month. When the month is up, change up content, CTAs, or images on that landing page. After the second month is done, compare data like bounce rate, conversions, and time on page in Google Analytics. You can easily see which version of your landing page drove the most success for your company, and you can use that page. You don’t have to stop there, you can continue to repeat this process until you find a landing page that yields the most results.
6. CTAs
Call to action, or CTA refers to how you are trying to get your client to take the next steps. In the example below, you can see that our CTA is “Start Free Trial”. Your CTA will depend on your business and the landing page that you have set up. There are dozens of CTAs that you can include, some of the most common are “Sign Up”, “Learn More”, “Contact Us”, and “Subscribe”. The ultimate goal with CTAs is to get your client to a second, third, fourth page to keep learning about your company and to lead to a conversion. You will want to include multiple CTAs on your landing pages. It’s a good idea to have different CTAs on every page.
On the page above, we have included the free trial button as well as contact, learn more, see all features, and see all integrations. This will help guide the website visitors to the exact information that they are interested in seeing, rather than having them search our site for it. On all of our pages, we include the free trial CTA as seen below. This will help your visitor remember why they are on your website if they get distracted with other information.
7. UI/UX
UI and UX refer to user interface and user experience, respectively. Essentially, they mean how easy your website is to use and how visually appealing it is. This is important to consider when creating your landing pages, because if they have a poor design, layout, broken links, etc, then your customer is not going to trust your business with their money. Taking the time to create an appealing website and landing pages will be worth it in the long run and you will have more success. I always suggest getting a second opinion when you are creating new pages, just to ensure you haven’t missed anything or to just check spelling and grammar.
A great tool that can help you improve your website is UserTesting. All you have to do is sign up, enter in your target demographic’s information, and a link to your website. Then, you will be able to have real people that meet your demographic requirements visit your website, explain how they feel, and navigate through your website. This can provide your team with a lot of unique insight.
8. Use Heatmaps
Heatmaps are a tool that you can use to see what your website visitors are the most interested in. With the help of a software like Hotjar, you can understand how your website visitors behave on your website. Below is an example of what you can expect with Hotjar. The red and yellow areas are the most clicked areas, while the blue areas may have been clicked a few times. You can see where their visitors are clicking, and where they are not. For example, if a certain page on your site has more clicks on your “Help” or “Live Chat” buttons, then maybe there is information missing on that page that would help your visitors better understand your company. This might be easier to understand than Google Analytics since it’s a visual display of your site. Heatmaps can also be helpful when you are A/B testing.
9. Website Personalization
Website personalization is a new, unique way to enhance your website and landing pages. Personalization allows you to show your website visitors a tailored view of your website, without changing the code of your site.
For example, let’s say your company is a marketing agency, and you’re looking for a new CRM software to help you manage your clients. This is a big decision, so you’re going to need to visit a few websites and pick the best option for you. If you click on a landing page, and the company shows you case studies, products, and use cases for other marketing agencies that they are currently helping, then you will be more likely to choose this company over one of their competitors who did not provide you with this personalized experience. Website personalization can give you a unique competitive advantage, and ultimately reduce your bounce rate and increase conversions. And, with the help of Visitor Queue, you can easily personalize your website in just a few easy steps. Try Visitor Queue out for free by starting a 14-day trial.
10. Lead Generation Software
Like I mentioned earlier, it can be very discouraging to see so many anonymous website visitors in your Google Analytics account. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could identify those website visitors? Fortunately, you can. With the help of a lead generation software, like Visitor Queue, you can identify the companies that are visiting your website every day. Along with company history, location, and other information, we also identify key employees that work at the companies. Reach out to decision-makers by email, phone, or LinkedIn that are all provided in your account. Generate 10-20% more revenue with Visitor Queue! Start your 14-day free trial today.
Wrap Up
As you can see, landing pages can drive a lot of success for a website. Without them, or with poor landing pages, your website can struggle. I hope you were able to take away a few helpful tips and improve your landing page efforts. If you’re still wondering where to start, take a look at some of the landing pages that your competitors have for the same keywords that you would be interested in. Don’t copy their page, but it can give you an idea of where to start and what to include in your own pages. If you have any questions about how Visitor Queue can help your business generate more leads, feel free to contact us.
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