8 Tips for Successfully Optimizing Your Landing Page

By Chas Pettrone

Internet Marketing

Landing pages are meant to persuade a visitor to order a product, sign up for services you provide, sign up for your newsletter, download a resource, and many other actions that directly impact your marketing goals. So it’s no surprise that strategically optimized landing pages are critical to the success of just about every internet marketing campaign.

Convincing a visitor to take action using a single page is a complicated task. There’s a lot involved in optimizing your landing pages for this purpose, but once you put in the time and effort, it can yield some pretty amazing results.

Here are a few tips to help you successfully optimize your landing page.

1. Keep it simple.

We’ve all heard it before: Less is more. And this is definitely true when it comes to landing page optimization. Make sure your designs are simple and get straight to the point. Avoid distracting your user with flashy design elements or animation. Use bullet points and/or short paragraphs with clear, concise language. You want your user to quickly understand the benefits of your offer, so place all of the most important elements of your page above the fold.

2. Keep it relevant.

A very important factor in your landing page’s ranking is the how relevant the content on your page is to your user’s search query. However your user gets to your page, you need to ensure your landing page gives them what they’re searching for to some extent — the more, the better! This is especially important when you’re driving traffic to your landing page through ads. If users land on your page, feel unsatisfied, and leave right away, your landing page’s bounce rate will rise, and, in turn, your rankings will fall.

3. Confirm where your users have landed.

When a user arrives on your landing page, they need to know right away they’ve made it to the right place. This establishes credibility and trust, makes the user more comfortable, and also motivates the user to proceed to the required course of action. This is especially true when users are navigating to your landing page from an external source. Incorporate some copy and/or images on your landing page that communicates to your user where they are and that they’re in the right place. Be sure to put this in a prominent position above the fold so it’s one of the first things your user sees when landing on the page.

4. Avoid information overload.

You might be tempted to put as much information as possible on your landing page, but this is usually not a good idea. Remember the object of your landing page is to get your user to convert, not get lost in reading through a ton of text. Keep the content on your landing page super simple and easy to read so your user can make their decision and quickly follow your call to action.

5. Keep your users on the page.

Once users make it to your landing page, you want them to stay there so they will convert into customers. To have a better chance of achieving this, reduce the navigation options on the landing page so the user has few opportunities to navigate away from your offer, get distracted, or lose interest. Essentially, your landing page should be similar to your website design-wise, but function as a stand-alone page where all or most click paths lead to your desired call to action.

6. Position calls to action on your page appropriately.

Users have different personalities and thus different ways of taking action. Some take action right away, others make decisions while still reading, and others want to read every last detail before they even consider taking the next step. You don’t want to lose any of these precious potential customers. That’s why it’s a good idea to feature calls to action throughout your landing page to accommodate every type of user. This might not work if your landing page is short or super simple; a good goal is to incorporate a call to action in every section of your landing page, design permitting of course.

7. Make your webform short and sweet.

Asking for lots of information from your user when they fill out your webform may be ideal from a sales standpoint; however, users usually feel uncomfortable giving out extensive details via a form on the internet, especially if this is the first time they’ve ever heard of your brand. The fact is, longer webforms simply don’t convert as well as shorter ones. The key here is making sure your form only asks for the details you absolutely require at the onset, usually a name and email address, and omitting those pieces of information you can obtain later. Once you’ve secured this basic information about your lead, then you can strategically follow up with and nurture your lead in order to learn more.

8. Optimize your Thank You Page.

The thank you page is the confirmation page a user is taken to after having successfully submitted your webform. Make sure you’ve done all you can to optimize your thank you page. Among other things, this will improve user experience, satisfaction, and engagement, and increase the number of return customers. A thank you page is also a useful tool in tracking the success if your landing page. You can utilize goal tracking in Google Analytics to track how many users got to your thank you page, which is also the number of users who converted via your landing page.

Landing pages are currently one of the most effective strategies in internet marketing. This is where Electric Easel comes in. We can help you develop a strategically designed and targeted landing page to drive traffic to your website and get more leads. Click here to check out an example of a landing page we created for one of our clients and the amazing results it brought in.