Landing Page Optimization – What You Need to Know

What if I told you that by using these proven techniques, you could increase conversions up to 300% while lowering traffic costs by 50%?

If this interests you then keep reading.

Online marketers spend too much time trying to figure out how to drive traffic through organic search and PPC advertising, but too little time evaluating what site visitors do on the landing page.

We want web site visitors to act in some way when they come to our site: filling out a form, contacting the sales department, clicking through to another page in the sales funnel, or downloading a white paper.

The big problem is that most landing pages fail to accomplish this adequately and do not persuade the visitor to take action. Fixing your landing page can ensure that you are getting the most out of your website traffic and the single most effective way to maximize the effectiveness of your online efforts and skyrocket profitability is to have a high performance landing page.

The goal is to decrease your cost per lead and increase your conversion rate; start with a best practices scrub of your landing page and reevaluate your landing page as if you were viewing it for the first time. Remove visual clutter, such as unnecessary, gratuitous graphics that distract people from looking at your call to action and remove marketing fluff.

Watch your scent trail and examine upstream disconnects. If you promise one thing in your pay-per-click ad, but don’t mention it on the landing page, you have lost a valuable visitor.

Don’t ask for too much information, and consider not asking for any at all; A site that offers a free download without requesting information from the user can have a conversion rate that’s 50 times greater than a standard email squeeze page. Ask for user information later in the lead generation process, after you’ve already given them something as people are happy to share their information once you’ve given them something for nothing.

Tools to Analyze Your Landing Pages

• Examine Most visited content and the popularity of a Web page determines whether it is getting the proper exposure. If a key page is not getting enough traffic, it may be necessary to move it to a more prominent location on your website, or to create more links to it.
• Path analysis shows the sequences of pages that visitors use to traverse your site and most common flows of traffic. It may be possible to change the position of key conversion pages or links within your site to benefit from rapid surfers.

• Top entry pages is the point of first contact with your site and the more traffic that is hitting a landing page, the more attention that page deserves in terms of conversion tuning.

• Funnel analysis – users must often pass through a defined series of pages in order to convert and you can see the efficiency of each step in this linear process. High abandonment percentages may signal that a particular step is problematic and ready for a refresh.

• Onsite Search can be a great source of information about what is not working if searches produce no matching results, indicating cannot find relevant content. Examine empty search results to identify the type of information that is not effectively being found on your site. For popular searches, consider them for inclusion in the site’s permanent navigation structure.

• Budget Usability testing – Take three test subjects through your mission-critical conversion task. All you need for an informal approach is a quiet room, a mock-up of your proposed design (it can be hand-drawn on paper), and a clear task statement.Ask the person to talk out loud about their thought process as they work through the steps.

• Customer Service Reps work with your website visitors’ problems all day long and can lead to valuable information about how to fix the underlying website problems.

• Eye-tracking is extremely useful in detecting problems in the earlier stages of the visitor’s decision process and can visually map out awareness and interest. If most test subjects do not look at the desired part of the page, they are not even aware that the conversion action is possible. These will quickly uncover problems regarding page layout, visual presentation of information and images, and content emphasis.

• Forums and Blogs are communities of interest that provide honest and unfiltered response to your website.Gain valuable insight into the concerns and problems of your target audience and gauge the loyalty or frustration of people, their immediate needs, and attitudes toward your industry, company, or product.

Read more about landing page optimization at mthink online marketing. Photo from single entry point