There are a few important steps to building landing pages that convert.
If someone ends up on your site’s landing page, they were most likely attempting to find answers. This can vary from people wanting to purchase products to people looking for more information. Whatever their reasons may be, if your page doesn’t meet the browser’s needs in the heat of the moment, your prospective clients will be gone in a flash. But what exactly is a landing page?
To be clear, a landing page is any page someone lands on after being directed from somewhere else. It’s not always the website’s home page. Many of us have had the experience of finding a new page by clicking on relevant articles or email broadcasts in a journey to get closer to our objectives or answers. It could be your website’s home page, or you could be attracting new visitors through your content. Regardless of what your landing page is, you need to make sure that you know how people are getting to your page and where to direct them from there.
The first—and the most important—part of building a great landing page is knowing where your people and traffic are coming from. How are these people reaching you? We would suggest using tools such as Google Analytics and focusing on what other websites the traffic is coming from, keyword phrases, and mobile versus desktop traffic. Once you know how and why they have arrived, you can see if the landing page reflects that and creates a consistent journey.
Once you understand where the people are coming from, take a look at what the visitors are doing once they arrive on the page is vital. Google Analytics can also help you drill down and learn where the people are clicking once they get to your landing page. Why is this important? It might tell you if the people are struggling to find what they’re looking for, and if that’s the case it could be due to a number of reasons. Maybe the site is too busy, or load time was an issue due to video. From there, you have a clear idea of what you can do to improve your site experience.
At the end of the day, it’s always good to test a few approaches. Your approach should be customized based on the data that you gleaned from the analytics report. As an example, maybe your “Make A Payment” button blends in with the entire site and is hard to locate because the button color should be more prominent. Or, maybe your call to action (CTA) needs to move and have fewer images or clutter.
But maybe you’re not of the school that likes to demand a phone number and email address before you share the information. The good news is, it’s okay to add a popup or CTA that asks users to take a survey about their experience on your site. Ask them why they visited, if they achieved what they wanted and if not, why not? This will at the very least provide you with metrics to build upon future success, know if you have it right, or know what needs adjusting.
5 Tips for Your Landing Page
The right landing page will go a long way in helping you to have an effective website. As you construct your landing page, consider the following:
- Use colors and images to draw customers’ eyes to the right places.
- Write a clear call to action (CTA) that encourages people to act.
- Make your page relevant to the link someone clicked to get there.
- Make sure your page is optimized for mobile users.
- Keep your page load time down by reducing your content.
A Checklist for Your Landing Page
As you continue to develop your landing page, consider whether it checks off all of these qualities:
- I know what sites or keywords my visitors are coming from.
- I’ve run analytics on my pages to check visitor behavior.
- I’ve checked my page speed and optimized for mobile.
- I have ideas on how to improve my pages.
- I’ve chosen one idea to A/B test.
- I’ve created a customer satisfaction survey for my landing page.
Once you’ve refined your landing pages, keep an eye on how they’re performing – you may need to update them again in the future. Once you understand how to check on your landing pages and improve their effectiveness, you’ll be well on your way to building landing pages that bring you the leads that you want.
About Neilson Marketing Services
Since 1988, Neilson Marketing has been implementing innovative marketing solutions and strategies for our clients in all areas of marketing. Contact us today at (800) 736-9741 to put our talent, expertise, and vast resources to work for you. Let’s make things happen, together!
