Landing pages are a visitor’s ‘first impression’, much like a handshake, so, make it a good one. Offer value and be engaging. However, consumer expectations change. Consequently, it’s important your landing pages meet their expectations and evolve according to what they expect. For example, you may consider landing pages to offer a different experience for visitors that are coming to your site for the second or third time, and offer ‘mobile-ready’ functionality. With the advent of mobile, QR codes may be a good option to bridge the gap between on and offline. These create a great opportunity for ‘on-the-go’ visitors allowing them to take action at a later time; plus, you can track and optimize them, and they’re easy to use. This is also a good way to catch some mobile traffic when you don’t already have a lot of mobile traffic coming to your page.
Here are just a few top considerations to include in your landing page optimization plan:
Relevance
Simply put, the more relevance the higher the probability of visitors converting. This can be optimized by location–make a localized version based on geo-location or even browser language. Localized content is a great way to connect with visitors. The more your landing pages speak to users’ keywords, the more targeted and relevant the information. This increases specificity and potentially conversions.
Provide a Customized Experience
Landing pages must be relevant. One way this can be achieved is by creating a simple multi-step form in which the screen your visitor sees next varies on their answer to the multi-step form they just completed. With this, the copy and applicable pictures on your site are tailored to each specific visitor’s information they input, tailored to their data. At this point, the visitor sees their relevant information, increasing the odds of conversion as relevancy has just increased.
Create a Path to Conversion
Forms are a great way to collect data, but don’t make it a hassle for visitors to the point where your bounce rate is through the roof. Break up the form into multiple pages so the hurdle is low, enabling visitors to quickly take action by completing 1 to 2 fields. If visitors proceed and are lead to a second page of the form, you can include more fields as the visitor has shown interest and each progressive step is more relevant. This prevents users from feeling overwhelmed, and multi-page forms are very effective. If you are a business with various locations, have the second form page be customized to each specific branch location.
Social Media Integration
There is a lot of power in social–use it. The first step is to add social elements to your page including share, ‘like’ and ‘+1’ buttons, among others. Fans and videos provide social proof–provide visitors several outlets to interact with you in many ways. Create landing pages for your social pages. Take this a step further and ask someone to share after they convert. The one pitfall is if everything is not talking to each other. It’s important to integrate across everything you’re doing, including your keyword landing pages, email landing pages, Linkedin landing pages, etc.–not just your PPC landing pages.
Results Driven Data
Data leads to actionable insights. You want to know the total number of visitors to your landing pages, bounce rates, flow of traffic and who/how many visitors converted. Dig deeper to find out the who, the what and the how. What are your visitors doing? Does a certain page have a high bounce rate? Were conversions higher last month? Tagging must be done in order to find out this information and track visitors’ engagement on your site. For example, if you see a certain page on your site has a high bounce rate, then the conversion rate must be low–dig deeper to see how this can be improved.