The success of a search engine marketing campaign is largely determined by the quality of your landing page. Follow these top five tips to improve your landing pages and get the most out of your campaigns.
1). Avoid Conversion Friction at all Cost
Conversion friction can be anything that interferes with a visitor easily and seamlessly completing a conversion goal. The most common culprit of conversion friction is requiring too much personal information too soon.
Today, landing page platforms make it all too easy to add a plethora of fields to a form. and before you know it, you’re asking for everything from first name and email to date of birth and social. Let me spend the next ten minutes divulging my personal info said no one. Ever.
Visitors won’t be fooled by optional form fields as opposed to required ones. They will only see the blank fields and presume a burdensome process is to come.
- Only ask for the most essential contact info: Name, Email, Phone
- Try to avoid making additional fields of info “optional”
2). Create Succinct, Useful Content
While it may seem like a brilliant idea to fill pages upon pages of content around a topic or product, adding value and imparting expertise, chances are your users won’t spend enough time on your landing page to do more than skim the surface. A study by Microsoft in 2000 observed that the average human attention span was 12 seconds. And it’s getting worse. The Microsoft study further revealed that as of 2015 humans have an attention span of just eight seconds compared to goldfish which have an attention span of 9 seconds.
So, unless your target users have fins and gills, getting to the point early and guide users toward completing a conversion goal as swiftly as possible.
- Write easily digestible content
- Bullets are the most efficient way of conveying information in a condensed format
- Feature the most important copy above the fold of the page so users don’t have to scroll very far down your landing page
3). Demonstrate Credibility & Trustworthiness
We’re in the era of fake news and users are super skeptical of online content. Because your customers are only slightly more focused than goldfish you have mere seconds to build trust with your visitors. Consider your own behavior when designing your landing page, such as the factors you weigh most heavily when making a purchase or inquiry. Are things like trustworthiness, accreditation and social proof important to you? Then they are for your visitors, too.
- Verisign Seal and BBB Certification generally indicate that a third-party confirms that you’re legit
- Awards, accolades or industry designations demonstrate expertise in your field are likely credible
- Customer testimonials are good social proof that you’re trustworthy
4). Optimize for All Devices
As you’ve likely heard countless times, there is more traffic on the internet from mobile devices than from desktops. It stands to reason that with such an enormous amount of traffic coming from non-desktop devices, many of the visitors to your landing pages will be as well.
The good news is optimizing for mobile can be free if you can select a responsive template or theme for your landing page. Responsive pages will automatically adapt the display to desktop, mobile or tablet devices. Most commonly used landing page platforms default to responsive design. If yours doesn’t or your inhouse IT Guy says it can’t be done, replace both immediately.
Determine if your site is mobile friendly with the Google tool:
https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
5). Test, Test Again and then Test Some More
“You can see a lot by just looking.”— Yogi Berra. One of the greatest values provided by digital marketing is that it’s immensely measurable. Impressions, clicks, time-on-site, bounce rate, entry page there is nearly no end to the amount of user data you can view with a simple, free Google Analytics account. If you’re not using this data to look for “wins” and modifying your landing page when you find them then your landing pages will never evolve.
“Wins”are variations and components of a landing page that do the best job of completing conversion goals. Overly complicated testing of multiple elements or running more than one test at a time can yield muddled results. Isolating a single element such as a call-to-action button color or changing a header image is cleanest and simplest ways to find “wins”.
There are no hard and fast rules to landing page design but keep these five tips in mind to improve your conversion rate and success of your campaign.
