Getting lots of traffic is great, but it’s what you do with that traffic that really counts. Landing pages are one of the most important elements of your conversion strategy because they provide users with access to relevant offers and funnel them towards your conversion goals.
There is no point in investing all of your time and effort into an SEO strategy if you don’t know what you’re going to do with the traffic once you acquire it. Having a landing page strategy is an essential element to the success of your SEO campaign. In many cases, if your website is generating a lot of traffic but failing to convert their traffic into qualified leads then the issue could be your landing page.
Why is landing page optimisation important?
Landing page optimization is the process whereby you test, enhance, and improve each element of your landing pages in order to drive conversions for your business. The most important thing that you can do is to continually test and record data in order to craft the best landing page for your niche and your business.
Don’t expect to create the perfect landing page first time around. The most valuable lessons that you will learn from your landing pages will come from real-life testing.
Below you’ll find some of our best tips to help you build landing pages that funnel users in the right direction. These principles couldn’t be applied for your SEO landing pages and your PPC landing pages alike.
1. Create a Simple User Journey
Before you create a landing page for your website you need to think about the end goal that you are trying to achieve. Users who click on your landing page should have a clear idea over where to go next.
Think of many pages as a stepping stone in the buyer journey, you don’t want your customers to end their journey by simply viewing this page, instead, you want to lead them towards a page or action that moves them closer to a conversion.
2. Focus on Call to Action (CTA)
This point is fairly self-explanatory. Once the user has landed on your webpage you want to have a clear call to action (CTA) that funnels them towards the next stage in the buyer journey. For an e-commerce business this could mean having clear ‘add to cart’ buttons, for a service-based business this could be having a ‘request a quote’ or ‘request a call back’ button.
The most important thing is that you create a logical experience for the user. If they have landed on a page of your website because they have searched for a specific item or service, then the landing page should clearly communicate how they can acquire that.
3. Play Above the Fold
In a time where mobile searches account for more than 50% of total web traffic, it’s more important than ever that landing pages reduce the number of scrolls necessary to reach a conversion.
Remember to keep your most important information above the fold. Due to the fact that the majority of visitors to your website will likely skim through the copy on the page, you need to ensure that CTA buttons and not hidden in between large blocks of content or below the fold. Make your landing pages engaging by adding headlines and subheadings that call for Action from the user.
4. Customer Testimonials Matter
When it comes to purchasing goods or services customers like to know that they are not alone in doing so. Testimonials are a great tool to drive conversion on your website because they allow your users to see what other people think about your product or service.
Large e-commerce businesses such as Amazon have been extremely successful in integrating customer reviews onto the page. By doing this they have been able to reduce the number of people who click away from the website to find out more information about a product. For small businesses implementing an SEO for small business strategy, integrating Google reviews on to a page through schema markup has never been easier.
Testimonials can go a long way in providing authenticity for your landing pages.
5. Add Contact Information
Providing contact information on your many pages is important for a wide variety of reasons. Perhaps most importantly, it allows users to easily contact your business through phone, email, or web chat. Users are also more likely to trust websites that freely offer a contact number, address, and real points of contact.
You can provide this information to a contact form at the bottom of the page or by having a clear in the header of your website.
6. Go Easy on Internal Links
Internal links are an important element of your on-site SEO, however when it comes to landing pages you want to ensure that you are using them sparingly. links have the potential to distract the user away from we want them to go on their journey.
Depending on the purpose of your landing page, the call-to-action button should be the only way that a user can logically navigate away from the page.
7. Optimise your Call to Action Buttons
Your Call to Action buttons should be straight-forward for the user. Make sure that you clearly communicate your offer with your CTA buttons. There are other areas of the page where you can get clever and creative with your content, however, it is best to keep things simple with your CTA buttons. Some of the most effective phrases include:
Conclusion
Building a landing page that is right for your business is all about trial-and-error. What makes a good landing page for one business may not work for another and vice versa. The most important thing that you can do as a business owner or developer used to test a range of pages and see which ones are the most successful.
Keep in mind the best practices that we have mentioned above and craft out a page that works for your industry.
