A landing page is one of your first chances to make a strong impression on a potential visitor. Landing page optimization will get more people to your website—and then keep them there.
You can have landing pages for nearly anything, from specific cities to product lines to digital marketing campaigns. But no matter the type of landing page you create, you need to make page optimization a priority. That is the only way to ensure the page appears in Google search results and encourages potential customers to turn into leads.
What is landing page optimization?
Remember that a landing page is a page of your ecommerce or business website that visitors arrive at when clicking on a link or ad. You can think of it as a type of homepage for a specific campaign or goal.
Once you understand, “What is a landing page?” you can take a look at optimization. Landing page optimization involves improving various elements of your landing page. By improving these elements, you improve the user experience and can achieve your desired goals.
A high-converting landing page will be optimized based on data. For example, to optimize a landing page, you can research keywords to help with SEO for landing pages. You can also survey your target audience to see what they expect from a landing page.
Why should you optimize your landing page?
Overall, optimizing your landing page can:
- Increase conversion rates
- Improve user engagement
- Boost overall business success
The primary goal of website landing pages is to capture leads or generate sales. No matter how visitors reach your landing page, you want to ensure that the time and money you spent getting there is worth the effort.
In the case of paid ads leading to the landing page, you spent part of your marketing budget to drive traffic there. In the case of links on social media, in emails, or through organic search methods, you spent time making sure that your audience would see the link and click on it.
Landing page optimization essentially ensures that all that time and effort do not go to waste. By optimizing your landing page, you maximize the benefits of the page, from user engagement to landing page conversion rates. This conversion rate optimization (CRO) reduces the cost of customer acquisition and maximizes your ROI on ad spend.
4 Things You Should Know and Do Before Optimizing Landing Pages
Savvy marketers know that you need some information before you can create effective website landing pages. Use the following as a checklist of what to learn and do before you start working on-page optimization.
1. Conduct audience research.
Make sure to research your audience before you start optimizing your landing pages. This lets you ensure that you know what your audience wants to see from the page.
More specifically, discover the pain points or goals of your users. That way, you can address those pain points on the landing page. Focus on the priorities of your website visitors. You can create different customer personas to visualize their needs and preferences more easily.
2. Analyze Existing Performance
As with any other marketing venture, you want to look at past performance. Analyzing the landing page’s existing performance will:
- Provide a benchmark that you can track progress against.
- Let you set realistic goals.
- See what works and what doesn’t.
- Pinpoint specific weaknesses to fix.
You can use a tool like Google Analytics to track different aspects of a landing page’s performance, like top referrers and session duration. Tracking other metrics like page load time can also help you identify potential areas for improvement.
3. Streamline the conversion process.
Take the time to streamline the conversion process, both on and off your website landing pages. Look at website performance data and make the necessary changes to improve landing page performance and boost conversions.
Don’t just rely on your analysis of current and past performance – ask your customers. Send surveys to customers to gather feedback. When planning those surveys, ask specific questions about what they liked or disliked about their landing page experience.
4. Define clear goals.
You also need to create clear goals for your landing pages before you start optimizing them. What do you want to accomplish with the landing page? Do you want to increase the number of leads you get? Do you want to get more click-throughs to other parts of your page or keep customers moving through the conversion funnel?
Be as specific as you can. Don’t forget to make your goals measurable, as this lets you track your progress toward achieving them.
9 Landing Page Optimization Best Practices
From SEO for landing pages to other best practices, the following are the most important things to do when optimizing your landing page.
1. Use clear and action-oriented CTAs.
While everything on your landing page should be clear, that is especially important for the CTAs. Pay close attention to messaging on your landing page so your call-to-action is goal-oriented and easy to understand. Avoid complicated or long-winded CTAs, which could confuse visitors. Keep it simple, such as the following examples:
- “Join Now!”
- “Sign up here!”
- “Try [Service]”
2. Minimize distractions.
Keep your landing page simple and clean. A landing page with too many visual elements will only serve to distract your visitors. An effective online marketing strategy is to minimize distractions on web pages so the CTA button can stand out. Use contrasting colors and white space so the content is easy to see but don’t go overboard with other visuals.
Also, limit distractions in terms of the potential actions on the landing page. Ideally, there will only be a small handful of actions available, such as clicking the CTA, filling out the form, or going to your homepage. Avoid extra form fields and additional website navigation, as each of these will distract from the desired action.
3. Utilize visual hierarchy.
When it comes to visual hierarchy, the most important consideration is what you put above the fold. If there is something you want your visitors to see, make sure that they don’t have to scroll down the page to see it. This has gotten harder with mobile devices smartphones and tablets, but it is still very doable.
To keep the most important elements above the fold, you will have to be concise with your messaging. Place the CTA front and center with just a sentence or two of copywriting around it. Include your value proposition in this sentence of copy.
4. Optimize page load speed.
Never overlook page load time. If your website doesn’t load within a few seconds, visitors will leave. You not only lose your chance to convert that customer, but it also contributes to your bounce rate and can even damage your reputation.
5. Ensure mobile responsiveness.
One of the most important aspects of landing page optimization is to ensure it is mobile-responsive. The vast majority of your visitors will likely be on mobile devices, so you need to ensure that they can view your website and use all the call-to-action buttons. After all, website visitors can’t complete the desired action if your landing page design doesn’t let them, which would hurt your landing page conversion rate.
6. A/B test.
A/B testing lets you easily see how different headlines or landing page copy compare to each other. You can use A/B testing to compare written content, images, other stylistic elements, your landing page form, and nearly anything else.
A/B testing is very straightforward. You create two variants of the element you want to test and then compare their performance. See which gets the better response rate or makes the most progress toward your goals. The most important aspect of A/B testing is that you should only change a single thing for each test. Otherwise, you won’t be sure which of the landing page elements caused the difference in data.
7. Personalize the experience.
The great thing about landing pages is that you can create as many as you want. This lets you personalize the landing page experience by segmenting your audience based on demographics, conversion goals, or other aspects. Divide your audience into as many segments as you need and create a unique landing page and unique ads for each.
A classic example of this would be a jewelry company creating one landing page for people buying items for themselves and another for those buying them as a gift for their significant other.
8. Add an element of scarcity.
Scarcity techniques work to deliver a sense of urgency. Using phrases such as “limited quantities” or “for a limited time” makes website visitors act quickly, as they don’t want to miss out on your offer. You can even include a countdown, whether it shows the time left in your offer or the number of products left.
9. Optimize for search engines.
Mobile optimization and reducing page load speed are parts of off-page SEO. You will also want to use other SEO methods to optimize your landing page. Start by researching keywords and then including them in the text copy on your page.
3 Tools for Landing Page Optimization
As with any other aspect of online business marketing, numerous landing page optimization tools can streamline and automate the process. They tend to fit into one of the following categories, although there are also other types of landing page optimization tools.
1. A/B Testing Tools
A/B testing tools make it easier for you to experiment with different variations of landing page elements. Remember that A/B tests involve changing just a single thing about your website and then comparing the performance of each version.
Unbounce is a popular landing page tool that includes A/B testing. This is primarily a drag-and-drop landing page editor complete with analytics and pre-designed templates. But it also includes A/B testing that makes it easy to optimize your landing page. However, this tool doesn’t include a heatmap and starts at $80 for a single domain. Keep in mind that there are domain limits on every plan, something not all tools impose.
2. Heatmap and Visitor Recording Tools
Heatmaps show you click activity on your website and other types of user behavior. Through these visualizations, you can see how site visitors interact with page content like buttons. Use the information from heatmaps to focus site visitors’ attention and make it clear where you want them to click. You can also use these heatmaps to position your most important CTAs in the area with the most clicks.
InstaPage is a good option for a landing page tool that includes heatmaps. This tool also includes A/B testing, SEO, and data quantification. It is especially good at testing landing pages with PPC and SEO. The biggest disadvantage of this particular tool is that you have to directly contact them for pricing.
3. User Feedback and Survey Tools
Before you start optimizing your landing page, you need to research your audience. Several tools that can help you with this, including user feedback and survey tools.
Hotjar is a strong choice for surveys and feedback collection. The tool offers AI capabilities for automatic survey generation, helping marketing teams save time. It also includes other landing page optimization features such as heatmaps, data segmentation, click tracking, and data quantification. There is even a free version available.
That being said, you have to manually take screenshots to save metrics, which is far from ideal. You also can’t segment your customers, something which is crucial for personalization.
The Recipe for Success: Landing Page Optimization + Customer Experience
When it comes down to it, optimizing your landing page is essential if you want to generate leads. But what you do after getting a lead is also important. Specifically, you need to improve the customer experience to ensure that you convert and retain customers. A good customer experience will also help you gain social proof like positive reviews and testimonials, attracting even more customers.
Podium features everything you need to improve the customer experience and continue the positive results you began with your optimized landing page.
The customer experience starts as soon as website visitors click the CTA on your landing page. If it takes them to a main page on your website, you can use Podium’s Website Chat to engage and convert them. If it has them provide their contact information, you can store that data in the Contacts system.
From there, use Inbox for written messages and Phones to call customers. Podium even has Text Marketing, letting you communicate with customers via their preferred channel.
Once you convert a customer, Payments streamlines the process of accepting payments, delivering a frictionless experience for both your team and your customers. At the end of the positive customer experience, use Podium to encourage Reviews, improving your online reputation.
FAQs
Q: What is a landing page?
A: A landing page is a single page of your website that you use for a particular marketing campaign or goal. The name comes from the fact that this is where visitors “land” when they click on an ad or a link in an email or on social media. Landing pages are typically used to bring people to your website, boost interest in your brand, or generate leads.
Q: What is the best way to optimize a landing page for lead generation?
A: The best way to optimize a landing page for lead generation is to combine multiple strategies. The most important include defining a goal, researching your audience, using A/B testing, making it mobile-friendly, reducing distractions, putting valuable information above the fold, and having clear CTAs.
Q: What is the optimal landing page structure?
A: The optimal landing page structure will be fairly minimal, with clear CTAs. All the most relevant copy and CTAs should be above the fold.
