Ross Crawford
“You never get a second chance to make the first impression”.
Whether you are meeting customers, attending an interview or even on a date, the first impression can either make or break that connection and ultimately define the outcome of the situation. That holds just as true for online businesses as well. Because when it comes to the digital world, we all know how fast-paced things can be. You've got only a few seconds to keep someone from closing the tab or bouncing right off your site and onto your competitors. That's where the digital marketing campaign comes in.
The ultimate purpose of any digital marketing campaign is to generate conversions, yeah? A conversion can be the generation of a lead, the sale of a product or service; the click on an ad or a simple email registration.
If you are looking for organic traffic and lead generation, landing pages are where you should pay attention because well-designed landing pages help you to build confidence and trust among your visitors. In this article, we would like to give you a comprehensive understanding of landing page optimisation for business websites.
Landing page optimization (also known as LPO) is a process of improving the performance of a website in order to increase conversions, leads, and sales. Landing pages are specific web pages on your website that are designed for one purpose: to bring visitors to your site and convert them into either sales or leads. To achieve this, landing page optimisation involves testing different layouts, designs, calls-to-action, images, colours, content and other elements to ensure your landing page meets its intended purpose. Optimising these components can help maximise the chances of a successful conversion rate and ultimately generate more revenue for your business.
A well-optimised landing page makes it easy for visitors to understand the page content and click the call to action. Optimising landing pages includes, but is not limited to, crafting compelling copy, inserting better images, speeding up page load time, updating the lead capture form, etc.
Regardless of where the traffic comes from, a landing page is often where potential customers make their first interaction with a brand or business. Landing pages are a vital part of your advertising and marketing campaigns as they can convert a visitor into a customer or lead.
Let’s take a look at why you should be optimising your landing pages:
As the landing page drives visitors to take a more specific action, it can be considered an effective lead-generating and conversion tool. It can encourage prospects to take action such as providing contact details, signing up for your email list, requesting a consultation, subscribing to a newsletter or making a purchase. It’s all about awareness, intent and direction.
Key Takeaway: A clutter-free landing page with a clear and direct offer, aided by simple and concise copy and compelling call-to-actions (CTAs) is a good foundation to start pulling in those leads.
Just because a person enters your site, doesn’t necessarily mean they will use your site. So a better user experience (UX) is great for customer conversions and retention.
An optimised landing page provides a positive user experience that makes achieving website business goals a no-brainer. Think of your landing page as the digital face of your business. Learn more about the target audience, user behaviour, and website design trends to enhance customers’ user experience.
To create a landing page that actively enhances the customer experience, create visually appealing graphics, a concise layout, relevant content and effective calls-to-action as we mentioned above.
These elements make it easier for visitors to find what they need quickly without any difficulty or confusion. In addition, providing clear information regarding the product or service being offered helps to build trust and encourages visitors to take action. Additionally, you also need to ensure that the page is optimised for all devices used to access it (desktop computers, tablets, smartphones, etc.). This will ensure that visitors have an enjoyable experience regardless of their preferred device.
If your landing page doesn’t look trustworthy to visitors, they will most likely exit the tab right away. Trust is a vital element to have on your website which can be easily gained through landing page optimisation. Displaying certification logos goes a long way to building trust. If you have partnerships or associations with relevant and well-known companies in your niche, then display them.
There are many elements to increase the level of trust on your landing page. You need to think of content, design, contact information, testimonials, banner ads, co-branding, etc. We cover that more in-depth in Chapter 3.
Let’s say you search for a keyword and find an interesting ad that you can’t stop yourself from clicking through. Once you click on it, you will be redirected to a landing page where you experience a great interface with relevant information that ideally matches search intent. A well-built landing page will intrigue the page visitor to take a desired action such as clicking on the “Buy Now” or “Sign up for our email newsletter” prompts. Remember, the return doesn’t have to be monetary, it’s all about getting your customers to the next stage in the customer buying journey as well as the sales funnel. But ultimately, optimising your landing page allows you to make the best possible revenue with the same traffic.
One of the top concerns among our business owners is a lack of brand awareness. They have so many great things to offer, but no one seems to know they exist. Landing pages can immensely help to increase the brand awareness of your business. Those that have consistent branding complement your brand awareness campaigns. Make sure the design, style, look, feel and copy is consistent with the content that links to it. Consistent brand awareness will help visitors recognise your brand and engage with it.
If you are a marketer or a graphic designer, you might have long known that a colour palette plays a significant part in the successful completion of any brand. Having a unique colour scheme will positively influence customers. To give you a good idea of where to start, check out Mr Digital's colour scheme of Red and Black here.
As a marketing agency, we wanted to bring a distinctly vivid colour palette to the table to strengthen the brand identity and build awareness. The iconic combination of the Red and Black logo colour scheme is perfect for a firm which is into branding and marketing.
Executing a great visual font size enhances the aesthetics and readability of your website. We have chosen a font size of 16 px to offer a consistent user experience for readers. Large images slow down your web pages which make for a less-than-optimal user experience. For our landing page, we keep the image size below 1MB while maintaining the highest quality. Also, we make sure the font size of H1, H2, H3…is consistent throughout the website.
Site usability is all about how easy it is for someone to use and navigate a website and this goes hand-in-hand with the user experience we talked about earlier. Landing page optimisation mainly focuses on the simplicity, consistency, familiarity, relevancy and accessibility of a site – Amazon is a perfect example when looking for a site with good website usability.
Amazon won consumers' hearts by designing the user experience for multiple generations. The eCommerce giant succeeds by offering a minimal, search-oriented user interface (UI) that accommodates both tech-savvy users and internet newcomers.
The desktop version of the site is optimised for both tablets and desktop screens. The flexible layout allows the website to adjust automatically according to the screen size. In addition to this, Amazon.com has almost zero downtime which every user would like to have.
Here are a few key tips for optimising your landing page effectively:
The look, feel, and overall structure of your page’s design will have a huge impact on the effectiveness of your landing page. Too much information can confuse visitors; a good landing page provides all the necessary information that encourages visitors to convert.
Use headlines and section headings to structure the information on the page as it helps in summarising the information and identifying if the information they are looking for is on the page or not. If users don’t see anything interesting, they can just skip to the next section or proceed to download.
Pictures are also crucial in today’s digital world as they can grab the attention of your target audience. Whether it’s a screenshot, an infographic or a photo of someone using your product or service, an image will surely be more engaging than text. Whatever you use, just remember, visuals are your best friend.
Point to Ponder: Don’t overload the landing page with too much information, images, and buttons. That just makes it confusing.
For Example: Airbnb’s landing page is proof that clean, simple and more personalised information converts well.
CTAs on landing pages move people further into your site by getting them to subscribe to your newsletter, download your ebook, or follow you on social media. The text for your CTA should be specific and irresistible. Now there are many methods of using CTAs that can work well for your brand, but it varies from business to business. For one, you could use commonly understood, short and action-oriented words in CTAs. You can place your CTAs in appropriate positions that will make them easy to see.
On the other hand, you could go for an out-of-the-box approach with CTAs like "Try Before You Buy", "Your Premium Product is Waiting for You", or "Sign Up Now and Get 10% Off". But whichever method you go with, just make sure that it aligns with the brand image and tone of voice.
Now, If you need to mention certain features or benefits, bullet points are the way to go. Bullet points are great for segregating information into easy-to-digest segments.
Use short paragraphs instead of long blocks of content. Split your copy into easily digestible paragraphs and space it out nicely to make it eye-catching.
Readers should feel more connected to your product or service and feel a personal benefit from converting from within your page.
Neil Patel has a very exciting CTA offering two options – a question asks simply: “want more traffic?” with two options available: “Yes, I want more traffic”, or “No, I have enough traffic”.
Obviously, no one will ever ignore the opportunity for more traffic. Seeing this popup causes the viewer to stop and think about the opportunity to drive more traffic. It’s human nature to feel you should choose an option when presented with options, so make the option you want them to take, the only option worth taking.
If you’re using too many links on your landing page, you need to stop. While internal linking should be part of your SEO strategy, it has no place on a landing page. Any link leading users off-page can serve as a distraction, which is why you shouldn’t include too many links on the landing page.
For marketers, the purpose of using a landing page is generally to generate leads. If you have links to other interesting articles, sites or pages, you are encouraging users to navigate away instead of converting as desired. Your dedicated landing page should be designed for one purpose only: Conversions, conversions, and more conversions.
Seeing is believing. Your visitors want to see if someone has used your product or service and had a great experience. Customer testimonials show the value that your customer base sees in your products or service. Your testimonials should highlight your perfect customers. Also, you need to make sure they are real and relevant.
The testimonials from previous customers on your website really make a difference when it comes to converting new visitors into loyal customers because users will always look for other consumers’ comments in advance of making a purchase. Just take Amazon for example, when was the last time you went on there and ordered something without checking the customer reviews first?
Having said that… don’t use testimonials that are too generic and weak.
Avoid testimonials like:
Not only are these testimonials too short, but they seem fake.
Testimonials should describe how your client has benefited from your business. See this example:
Top Tip: You can even use a quote from the review as a headline and include the positive rating the customer gave your product.
A landing page usually has a single goal whether that’s to request a whitepaper or to get a lead to sign up for a free trial. You should keep this in your mind when writing the content along with any questions the lead might have about your offer. For a landing page to convert more traffic there is a need for clear, relevant, and compelling offers. Users should clearly understand what you are offering and what action you want them to take next.
Mention a few features about your offer that compels users to take an immediate decision and yield results quickly. Make sure your content matches the offer and your features are written as benefits.
Now as an example, let’s see how Uber uses a benefit-rich headline to highly focus on the offer they’re promoting. Instead of saying “We need a taxi driver” or “Get a job with Uber”, the company focuses on how people benefit from that – earn money!
In this example, we can clearly see that Mailchimp, one of the leading email marketing tools, has a feature-focused headline that directly describes the true purpose of the software.
Back in the day, this idea of 'above the fold' was used by news publishers as they put important headlines and images in the area above the fold to attract readers, you know, so it's the first thing that readers see. When somebody visits your landing page, they are there for a reason: to get the offer or asset they’re looking for and maybe grab some additional data along the way.
So, keep your landing page elements above the digital fold, meaning that you need to put the most important things, i.e. what you want or need them to see, at the very top and work your way down. Following this visual hierarchy will allow users to get what they came for (which boosts user experience and satisfaction). However, if they do need more information, they only need to scroll further.
Important Note: Most of your visitors just scroll the page and then proceed to the form. If you really need to drive a lead, make sure everything that’s of value is visible upon accessing the page. Make it engaging by adding a compelling headline and a CTA that stands out.
Take a look at Ahrefs’ above-the-fold approach:
The headline and subheadline indicate what the service does, while the CTA communicates and entices the user to sign up. Also, they have listed satisfied customers at the bottom, right before the fold to provide that credibility and, much-needed, customer confidence boost.
Make sure there isn’t any mismatch between what the ad promises and what the landing page delivers. Visual consistency can make a huge difference in conversion rates. The font, text, imagery, colours, spacing and other elements of your ads should look similar visually and present the same offer or your potential customer will be confused or irritated.
details will not only contribute to great design but also provide a positive experience for your users. Landing pages are the key to keeping potential customers engaged and closing them in under a minute. Plus It helps to create trust by presenting the same message and information from page to page, giving your visitor a sense of familiarity that inspires confidence in your product or service. Establishing a consistent look and feel also creates a more professional appearance, which helps to boost your brand identity.
Top Tip: When you run a Google Ads (previously Google AdWords) campaign, make sure your promotion remains the same throughout your entire advertising process.
Optimising your landing page can improve marketing campaigns and increase the number of leads. More leads for your business means more ROI for your bottom line. To accomplish this, you need to follow landing page best practices to make sure you’re developing a high-converting page.
Want to see a 10% lift in conversions? Try modifying your landing page headline. Your headline is the first thing your visitors see when he or she lands on the page, so it needs to grab their attention and encourage them to take action. Attractive benefit-rich headlines capture your audience’s attention faster and entice them to stay on the page. The best headlines are short, and simple and focus on the outcome of what you’re offering, not the features or the services.
Here’s an example from a landing page on our website:
The headline shown here actually offers visitors clear-cut solutions to solve their problems. It highlights the benefits of our services and clearly tells them we can help them achieve the outcomes they are looking for… like first-page Google rankings, more leads and ultimately more sales from their marketing activity.
Take Action: So ask yourself, what are your benefits? And how can you present those within your headlines?
Using multimedia elements on a landing page can help improve user interactions in several ways. First, multimedia elements such as videos, animations and GIFs can capture users’ attention and make the message more impactful. This can be especially important for pages that are trying to convey complex information or ideas quickly. Furthermore, these elements can inject some personality into the page, making it more engaging and memorable to visitors.
Additionally, they can also be used to add interactivity to the page by prompting users to engage with certain features or take action in a specific way. Finally, using multimedia elements helps keep users coming back for more by providing visual stimuli and an enjoyable user experience overall.
There is one thing no brand can exist or thrive without – a compelling offer. It’s a vital part of any business's success and a driving force that keeps the entire business moving seamlessly ahead. All you have to do is understand and implement the offer clearly. No matter who you are or what you’re selling, when people come across your offer, they’ll need to be convinced. Develop and deliver a very clear and easily understood offer if you want people to purchase.
This is why we have included the best offer on our SEO page i.e GUARANTEED PAGE 1 GOOGLE RANKINGS IN 90 DAYS OR WE WORK FOR FREE. We have proven expertise and experience in SEO services so we guarantee the best results. Our talented team will get your business on page 1 of Google’s SERP in 90 days or we will deliver our service for FREE!
Responsive design has gone from being a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘must-have’ component in the landing page design strategy. That’s because the number of smartphone users is increasing at a fast rate. And that isn’t going to change any time soon.
With a responsive design, users can access your website from any device smoothly and it will look and function perfectly based on screen size, platform, and orientation.
You should deliver users the same experience while browsing the web on their smartphones or computer without sacrificing any of the quality or ease of navigation. The idea is simple – great responsive design leads to more visits, resulting in more conversion and sales.
Point to Ponder: are your landing pages compatible with any device and viewable on any screen size?
You may be confused by what a Call-to-Action can do for a landing page. But the secret is that people actually expect relevant CTAs from the page they visit.
Improving CTAs in the landing page can prompt your leads, potential prospects and customers to take a specific desired action.
If you are running an e-commerce company, you will definitely want people to purchase your product. So, you will often go with the CTA of ‘Buy Now!’ or ‘Add to Cart’.
Likewise, there are other CTAs that you can consider using such as:
Check out how MOZ used clear, concise, and obvious CTA to drive visitors to try the free version of the tool.
The contact form is a vital component of every landing page. If the form is too long, asks unnecessary questions or contains too much information, the chances of conversion are less.
You want to gather as much information as possible about your lead, but only ask what you need! A name and an email are more than enough to drive a new lead. In essence, take a minimalistic approach.
Top Tip: Let’s say you don’t want to call the prospect after they fill out the form. Then you don’t have to ask for a phone number. Are you planning on qualifying them with the career? If not, you don’t need their employee details
This is an important part of optimising your landing page. Every millisecond does count when it comes to loading a page! Google is all about good user experience nowadays.
To evaluate your page speed, open up Google’s PageSpeed Insights and enter your website URL into the bar:
This is great. You don’t have to worry about achieving 100%, but you want to aim for the green (90+). Websites can get cluttered by a lot of unnecessary features and purposeless functionalities. Site size especially, image size makes a huge impact on your site speed. The larger your content/image, the slower the site.
The ideal loading time for a landing page is 2-3 seconds. Anything slower than that can cause user frustration and lead to an increase in bounce rates. The goal should be to ensure users have access to the content and features they need quickly and seamlessly. This can be achieved by optimising images and code, taking advantage of caching, using an appropriate hosting provider, utilising Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) where applicable and more.
A landing page that doesn't rank well in terms of SERPs is pretty much useless when it comes to driving conversions because, for all intents and purposes, it's invisible to the average viewer. If you want to get targeted traffic to your landing page, then you definitely need to optimise for search engines.
Determining target keywords is super important. Having access to reliable, accurate, easy-to-use SEO tools will make your keyword research strategy better and stronger.
The next step is to incorporate your keyword throughout your landing page.
This includes:
Here is what we did to optimising our website landing page:
Having contact information on your landing page is important because it allows visitors to reach out directly if they have any questions or comments. This can help build trust between the visitor and the brand, leading to increased engagement and participation.
Additionally, having visible contact information makes it easy for visitors to get in touch with support quickly and easily. This can help improve customer satisfaction, since customers don't need to hunt for contact information when needed, making them more likely to return again in the future.
Everyone has his/her preferred way to contact a company, some will like to make a phone call while others like sending an email or leaving a Facebook message. That’s why, it is important to give as many options as possible to contact you – You can put your phone number or email address on your landing page, or you can use a contact form. Better yet, to streamline the process, you can just offer potential clients the option of booking a quick 15 min call with you, at their convenience, like we did here.
An exit popup is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the final effort to keep your users on the page when he or she attempts to leave the site. The visitor must land on your page, and then scroll down to check out the content. Then, finding nothing of interest, they move the mouse pointer towards the X button in the corner of the browser. At that point, the exit popup appears.
It might look something like this:
Wordstream uses its exit popup window as a way to increase the number of downloads of their e-guide “Beginner’s Guide to PPC”. If you pay attention, you’ll see plenty of similar exit popups all over the Internet, from retail and SaaS businesses to blogs and local service business sites.
A lot of businesses set landing pages and forget about them. Landing page A/B testing is a must if you want conversions. It’s the only way to know whether your current landing page is the best you can do and you can determine which version of a landing page results in more clicks, conversions and reduced bounce rate.
So, how can you conduct successful A/B testing?
That’s not all! You can test the offer, page layout, header, CTA button and more…
By continuous testing, you can refine your landing page over time. The more AB tests you run, the more precise your data becomes resulting in more audience engagement.
You can use Google Analytics to track how well your page is doing. Integrate your landing page with Google Analytics to test landing page performance metrics and fine-tune any element if needed.
To get started, set up specific conversion goals or ecommerce tracking on your landing page.
Remember what counts as a conversion differs from company to company. If you are running a blog website, then conversions could mean users subscribing to an email newsletter, downloading an eBook, or filling out a form. And, if you have an e-commerce store, conversions would be the number of products bought by visitors.
Once it’s done, head to Behaviour > Site Content > Landing Pages
Additionally, you should also be using data such as customer feedback, web analytics, or heatmaps to inform page design decisions or track performance metrics over time.
Here are the top five, best landing-page optimisation tools that can save you hours and skyrocket your conversion rates.
Crazy Egg offers several features to help you optimise your landing page. Heat maps allow you to visualise how users interact with elements on a page, while scroll maps show what sections of the page are most frequently seen by visitors. With A/B testing, you can create multiple versions of a page and compare different scenarios for better performance results. It’s the most effective way to get a look at how users actually interact with your site and what you might be able to improve for better conversions.
It is amazingly easy to use. Once you sign up, you can start running user behaviour reports instantly. Crazy Egg lets many customers discover that website visitors are clicking on elements of the webpage that aren’t even links! Solving these design mistakes will improve your landing page’s engagement and conversion rates.
Optimizely is one of the most advanced A/B testing platforms that provides powerful personalization capabilities to help you deliver tailored experiences to targeted audiences. It offers an intuitive visual editor tool that allows marketers and developers to easily configure experiments without coding skills and run them in multiple environments such as web or mobile apps. The platform also comes with reporting and analytics tools that provide insights on experiment performance along with data-driven optimization recommendations based on user engagement metrics.
The Landing Page Analyzer tool tests the effectiveness of your landing page based on 21 questions. All you need to do is submit answers about your landing page, with questions inquiring about the number of offers on your landing page, the availability of product screenshots, landing page length, and more. In the end, you will get a personalised report with actionable recommendations to uplift your conversion rate.
With VWO Landing Page Analyzer, you will get a comprehensive analysis of your page on the following key parameters:
Google Optimise is a free tool that offers basic A/B testing features and real-time analysis of test results within its integration into Google Analytics. It includes features such as multivariate testing, split URL testing, advanced segmentation, and detailed analytics for an in-depth understanding of visitor behaviour on your website or app.
Unbounce is an intuitive drag-and-drop builder with features such as popups, sticky bars, and dynamic text replacements all of which can be used to optimise your landing pages for higher conversion rates. Its interface allows you to quickly build customised web pages without any technical knowledge required, while its A/B testing feature helps you identify the best-performing pages among different variations to drive more conversions from each visit.
The ultimate goal of any landing page optimization is to convert prospects into customers. To put it simply, the landing page conversion rate shows the number of people who completed your call to action out of everyone who landed on your page.
A “conversion” could be almost anything like:
The average conversion rates for landing pages can vary wildly depending on what industry you’re in. For instance, if you’re into construction service, a conversion can look very different from a company in the Health industry.
The average conversion rates of the top landing pages currently vary depending on the industry and type of page. Generally, conversion rates tend to be highest for pages designed to drive direct sales or inquiries, while they are typically lower for pages optimised for branding or awareness. On average, pages designed to convert visitors into leads can expect a conversion rate of around 2-5%, while those with high-intent transactional goals may see an even higher rate of 5-15%.
But, as mentioned before, your conversion rate will still vary due to the type of industry you’re in, the offers you put out, and your audience’s behaviour. Some industries, niches, and sectors convert leads easier than others. That’s common. Instead of comparing yourself with other benchmarks, consider how other sites in your niche are performing to discover whether you’re ahead of the competition or not.
If you are not satisfied with your current landing page conversion rate, there is always room for improvement.
Why settle for average if amazing is attainable?
Optimising your landing page is one of the most important steps you can take to ensure your business’s success. By optimising the user experience, you can improve the overall performance of your website and increase conversion rates. A few key takeaways include ensuring that your landing page loads quickly and looks great on both desktop and mobile devices, as well as making sure that it communicates concise messages and includes clear calls to action.
Additionally, A/B testing helps to identify successful elements of your website, while personalisation allows you to deliver tailored experiences to targeted audiences. Taking advantage of these tools can help you get the most out of your website or app and maximise conversions.
And lastly, the more visually dynamic the landing page is, the better your odds are of making those conversions. Now, give it all a try! If you're still struggling with all of this, get in touch with us and we would be more than happy to help you!
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