15 Simple Landing Page Optimization Tips to Improve Your Conversions
Are Your Website Visitors Not Converting?
The primary purpose of any business website is to attract visitors, tell them how awesome your business is, and persuade them to take action. This is called the “Journey of Conversion.” A key element of that strategy is website landing pages.
But simply having landing pages on your website is not enough; you need to optimize landing page conversions to succeed. These simple landing page optimization tips will show you what to do.
But landing page optimization doesn’t happen overnight and is not a one-time effort. If you want better landing pages, focus on collecting data. You should design and optimize your landing pages based on what you already know about your audience.
But that alone is not enough. You must collect even more information as more people visit your website.
Converting that data into informed decisions about your marketing funnel can produce more leads and sales. To help you do better, I want to share a few basic tips and tricks to help you attract a bigger target audience and convert more online consumers. It starts with understanding why your landing page optimization efforts are falling short.
Why Is My Landing Page Not Converting?
Landing pages fail to convert for lots of reasons. Most often this is because a business or product brand has little concept of what the prospect wants. You will never design a successful landing page if you don’t clearly understand your target audience’s needs, expectations, or desires. It is that simple.
Here are some other common landing page optimization errors you better avoid:
- Not focusing on mobile-first web design
- Ineffective headlines
- Unrecognizable or confusing calls to action (CTAs)
- Distracting visitors from your primary objective
I’ll explore each of them in-depth later, but understand that you won’t know why your landing page doesn’t convert until you collect data. I’ll show you how in a minute.
What Is a Good Landing Page Conversion Rate?
The best landing pages convert at rates of 15 percent or more. But not many landing pages fall into that category. It is much more common for most businesses and product brands to have actual conversion rates anywhere between 2 to 6%. And yes, there are many landing pages that don’t even convert at that level. Ouch!
And landing page conversion rates may not be the best measure of their effectiveness as they may not tell you the whole story. A much better measure of your success is an improvement. If your conversion rates stay flat or decline, you’re not collecting data and using it to improve your landing pages.
There should be a strong correlation between your web traffic and conversion rates. If your web traffic grows, you should convert more visitors. Of course, it doesn’t always happen that way. What if you’re getting high-quality traffic from Google search but still not seeing conversions?
A negative correlation between traffic and conversions means something is wrong with your landing page, offer, product, or combination.
- Landing page: The design, framework, imagery, or other qualities of your landing page turns off readers for some reason.
- Offer: The “hook” you’re using to get readers to convert doesn’t resonate with your audience.
- Product: The product you’re selling isn’t sufficiently desirable to convince people to buy.
Figuring out what the problem is will help with your landing page optimization.
What Exactly Is Landing Page Optimization?
Landing page optimization is optimizing or improving each element on your landing page to increase conversions. Instead of redesigning the entire page based solely on a hunch, you use data and anecdotal evidence.
The best part? You can collect information before your landing page ever goes live. Surveying your audience, for instance, will help you better understand what they expect and like. One of my preferred survey tools is SurveyMonkey. Of course, you can also use a form builder like Paperform to create your own online surveys.
However, you will not create the perfect landing page from the start. Instead, you design and launch your landing page. After that, you track its performance and make tweaks as you analyze the data and observe your conversion rate.
Identifying Potential Problems
Unfortunately, many people are using the wrong landing page optimization strategies. All they know is something isn’t working. Therefore, they decide to change everything. And that is the wrong approach to landing page optimization. A better strategy is to identify problems that contribute to low conversion rates so you can change those.
The easiest way of doing that is by using a heat map. Here is one of my favorite heat map tools. A heat map will show you where website visitors are clicking on your landing page. Are they ignoring your call to action? Do your visitors focus on unimportant elements, such as a stock photo? Are they simply scanning the page without finding what they are looking for?
Tracking Website Visitor Behavior
Heat maps aren’t the only visual data reports that can prove effective for landing page optimization. Scroll maps, confetti maps, overlay reports, and list reports provide valuable information. And don’t forget that Google Analytics can also provide helpful insights into visitor behavior.
Constant Improvement Over Time
Approach landing page optimization using best practices and strong data to improve your website conversion rates. The process starts the minute you begin designing the page, but it lasts long after the page goes live.
I keep reminding our clients that you don’t create just one landing page. Landing page optimization involves building many different types of landing pages and modifying them to meet the expectations of your specific target audience.
There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all landing page. What works for a fine dining establishment will not work equally well for a software company.
But a few common landing page optimization strategies and components are very effective across virtually any product or service offering.
15 Simple Landing Page Optimization Tips
1. Make Your Offer Clear
Consider how you can make customers experience positive emotions when planning your optimization strategy. You want them to feel smart, appreciated, inspired, and excited. Start by thinking about your customer’s specific goal and turn that goal into a headline.
2. Keep it Simple
A simple landing page might seem counterintuitive, but it removes the visual clutter. You want your website visitors to focus on the prize: your call to action.
Dropbox is consistently one of my favorite examples. The company creates awesome landing pages that communicate volumes without many words.
3. Be Consistent
Visual consistency can also make a huge difference in conversion rates. Ideally, your landing pages should be similar in look and feel to the other pages on your website or e-commerce store. Otherwise, potential consumers will be confused or irritated to leave your site.
This also extends to your other digital profiles. If you market your product or service on LinkedIn or Facebook, make sure your landing pages on those platforms are as close as possible to the landing pages on your website.
4. Focus on Essentials First
Unless you have a very small landing page, your visitors will only see a small portion of it when they first arrive. This is especially true for mobile consumers viewing your site on a smartphone. Therefore an absolutely essential landing page optimization tip is to place your key message where visitors are sure to see it right away!
Make your landing page visitors clear about what you are offering and how that benefits them. You can fill in more relevant details further down the page. But don’t expect impatient mobile visitors to do much scrolling around before they leave!
5. Optimize for SEO
People find landing pages via organic search all the time. Maybe one of your landing pages is your home page, for instance, which means that it should — at the very least — come up if someone searches for your company’s name. You can also rank for industry-related keywords.
6. Use Urgency
There’s a reason why “limited time” and “limited quantities” are among the most common marketing phrases. Scarcity compels your landing page visitors to act now because they know they might miss out if they wait.
7. Use Effective CTAs
A call-to-action button shouldn’t stress out or confuse the reader. Make your offer clear, concise, and obvious. Effective landing page optimization means staying away from fancy language or complex offers. Try something like these:
- Download Here
- Try for Free
- Join Now
- Learn More
Simple, right? And very effective.
8. Add Contact Info
You can provide your website visitors with contact information in many different ways. You can put your phone number or email address on your landing page or use a contact form. Other companies, such as Shopify, include links to their help centers. Customers know by now that they can find contact information, answers to frequently asked questions, and tutorials in help centers.
9. Focus on High-Quality Visuals
Avoid using stock images if you want your message to pop and your service or product to stand out. Instead, hire a professional photographer to shoot high-quality images that communicate your brand value and mission.
Likewise, avoid using cheap clip art or templates. Chances are your target audience has seen them before, so your message will simply become part of the digital background noise.
10. Add Testimonials
Your target audience needs to know that other businesses have used your products and services. Not only that, but you want to communicate that you have helped your existing customers achieve the same results your target consumers expect.
Testimonials are among the best ways to do this. If you can convince your customers to create a video testimonial, you’ll have an edge on the competition. Quotes work well, too, as long as you use the customer’s full name, business, and potentially their image. In my experience the latter is usually the sticking point, so don’t push this.
11. Try Different Forms
Some marketers believe that only incredibly short forms work well. Only ask for essential info. Personally, I am more likely to fill out essential bits only than provide a lot of info, especially at the beginning of my journey of conversion.
But it all depends on the product or service you are trying to sell. A longer form can be more effective if you want to qualify leads for an expensive product or service. You might get fewer leads, but those leads will be more qualified.
For instance, asking about the potential customer’s budget for a web design business can save you time. A customer looking for a $500 basic starter site won’t utilize your service if your minimum package starts at $20,000.
12. Use Contrasting Elements
A very effective landing page optimization strategy is the use of contrasting elements. Utilize large text and bold fonts to make your headlines stand out from the body text. Vibrant colors automatically direct visitors to essential elements. Another tactic is to use black and white images on colored backgrounds.
13. Try an Exit Popup
An exit popup appears on your landing page screen if a visitor attempts to leave the page. This is another opportunity to create a conversion. Exit popups are less intrusive than popups that appear as soon as a visitor arrives or simply while he or she is looking around.
Use a combination of compelling visual imagery, a strong headline, and CTA text to get users to click. Try incentivizing the exit popup with a special discount or other offers. But don’t come across as too pushy or desperate!
Using a popup tool like Tidio, you can create not only exit popups for individual pages on your site but also A/B test variants and even benefit from AI. You’ll get lots of useful data and a way to snag visitors who decide to hang around because of your well-timed offer.
14. Test Everything
A fairly simply landing page optimization method is A/B testing. Unfortunately, it is also one that is frequently overlooked. You create two different versions of your landing page, headline, call-to-action, or any combination thereof, and test them to see which version provides better results.
The more A/B tests you run, the more accurate your data becomes. Each A/B test should include a single change to one variant, such as your CTA. But be sure to only change one element at a time! You won’t know which one worked best if you change multiple elements.
After collecting data and getting to know your audience, you can apply what you learned to a redesign and verify that it improved your conversion rate via A/B testing. And so on…
15. Remember Sex Sells
Never underestimate the power of sex to market your product or service. This does not mean that anything lewd or crass should be part of your landing page optimization efforts. But passion and desire are very effective motivators.
Learn to use that to your advantage. Selecting just the right images and tweaking your ad copy can make your product or service irresistible to your target audience.
Optimizing Your Landing Pages
If you’re just starting landing page optimization, you’ll improve your chances of converting more visitors by following this guide. But remember that landing page optimization works differently for each business or product brand. You may need to tweak our basic strategies and recommendations to achieve the best results.
To recap, here are 15 strategies that will help you boost your conversion rate:
- Make Your Offer Clear
- Keep it Simple
- Be Consistent
- Focus on Essentials
- Optimize for SEO
- Use Urgency
- Use Effective CTAs
- Add Contact Info
- Use High-Quality Visuals
- Add Testimonials
- Try Different Forms
- Use Contrasting Elements
- Try an Exit Popup
- Test Everything
- Remember Sex Sells
By implementing some or all of these landing page optimization strategies, you will meet the expectations of your target audience and convert them into consumers and even advocates of your product or service.
Don’t forget that basing your website and landing page design changes on real user data can improve your conversion rates even more. Use visual data reports and recordings whenever possible to collect more information about your website visitors.
With those strategies in place, you’re well-positioned to conquer your competition. We are here to help!
Do You Need to Optimize Your Landing Pages?
Hopefully, these steps will help you optimize your own landing pages. If you need additional help or have questions, we are here to help. But, first, look at our portfolio and read our case studies.
Then, if you believe we are a good fit for your WordPress web design needs, let’s talk! We offer a full range of consulting and design solutions for businesses and product brands.
And if you are unsure how to optimize your landing pages for conversions, let’s talk. Our team will listen to your concerns, evaluate your needs, and develop a list of things you need to optimize your landing pages and increase conversions.
Did You Optimize Your Landing Pages?
Did you recently create new landing pages or optimize your existing ones? How did that go for you? Do you have any other tips for landing page optimization to share with our audience? Feel free to add your comments below so our audience can benefit, and grab our feed, so you don’t miss our next post! And feel free to share our landing page optimization tips with your audience!
Thank you! We appreciate your help ending bad business websites, one pixel at a time!
By Gregor Saita
Co-Founder / CXO
@gregorsaita
