How to Optimize Landing Pages

What is a landing page?

A landing page can either be a page on your website that is reached via the organic search engine results, or it can be a page that has been created for a specific purpose, possibly to be linked from a banner, an email campaign or a pay-per-click advertisement.

Why you should design your landing pages carefully

Once your visitor reaches your landing page you have approximately 4 seconds to answer the question he was looking to solve or to supply him with the information he was searching for. Once he is on the page your next objective is to get him to take action.

Careful consideration should be taken when designing your landing page in regards to placement of the various elements. You should be willing to test various versions in order to discover what works best. Each page should be approached on an individual basis. What works on one page may not work on another.

Website landing pages

Now that you realize that every page on your website is a potential landing page you will now look at each page in a totally different light and think carefully how to optimize all of these potential landing pages. Is every web page on your website appealing? Does every page supply enough immediate information to convince your visitor to stick around? Does every web page have an obvious call-for-action whether it is an “add to cart” button, a “subscribe to newsletter” area or an eye-catching button to a form for the visitor to request more information, if it is not possible to add the form to the actual page.

Landing pages linked from an advertisement

These pages are usually not reachable via the website navigation and are generally easier to design. You know how and why your visitor has arrived at this page so all you need to do is make certain you answer all the questions you promised in your email, banner and/or Pay Per Click advertisement. You should definitely try a simple A/B test and remove unnecessary navigational bars. This test will help you learn if your conversion rates will increase by removing these unnecessary links. The results will vary from site to site and product to product, however, in most cases the conversion rate can increase drastically by removing any unnecessary or distracting links.

Some basic landing page rules:

1. Use a strong title. For landing pages specifically designed to link from an advertisment or email then this should reinstate the reason the visitor arrived at this page, and the fact that he is going to get the answer he is looking for.
2. Keep the design simple.
3. Get the message over fast.
4. Write short paragraphs, generally not more than 4-5 lines.
5. Use bullets to make for easier reading and understanding.
6. Offer multiple calls-for-action especially if the page is long. You can even add an additional form at the bottom of the landing page if the content is very long.
7. Don’t ask for too much information on the form. Remember for each extra field you add your conversion rates will drop.

The most important thing is to remember that your landing page is never perfect. You should be constantly testing and thinking how to optimize the landing page in order to increase the conversion rate.