Will your customers find the information that they expect?

Ever land on a website and thing, “Hey, that’s not what I asked for!” or “That’s not what I expected!” You also probably left that website quickly afterward. Landing page optimization ensures that the first page customers land on from an outside source, whether a search engine or social site, is the expected one.

How do you use landing pages? (The Application)

Once you start to get top rankings, traffic from search engines ensues. Many companies think that their work is done; we have traffic, so we have succeeded, right?

If that’s you, we apologize how bluntly we broke the news. But ‘splashing down’ is one of many steps, and landing page optimization ensures browsers continue to click onto other pages. Basically, modifying landing pages are like mini-optimizations on a page-by-page basis. You do this through content building, header changes, navigation changes, and placing informative imagery that sums up the contents of the page.

Note that the traffic to your website starts out the same, but it drops off even after one page. Note that successive pages show drop off, too.

Why it’s so important (The Result)

The reason that many sites have so many “1 page visitors” is that often a browser lands and leaves immediately. This does nothing for your financial bottom line; you think you’re getting traffic, but that traffic is not making you money. Landing page optimization targets the specific problem of landing onto a website. We have seen companies increase their sales by 15% on this tactic alone.

What’s more, it’s instantaneous. Once modifications in navigation, page content, and imagery have been made, the results can be clearly seen in your analytics program; the ‘bouncing’ lowers, and sales increase, especially for particular pages. Further examination of those pages gives you a deep understanding of what type of human traffic is coming to your website. Believe it or not, it might even start to help you rewrite sales pitches (we’ve seen it happen)!

Pitfalls of landing page optimization.

You can spend literally hours, almost days on just a handful of pages. What is important to consider is how many pages you have that rank for high-yield keywords, and create a certain priority to what pages you will optimize first.

Remember also that analytics can be rather vague when defining what landing pages do – you know a particular page is not pulling like other, more successful, pages, but you can’t determine the cause. You usually can get an overall understanding of what might be wrong, but implementing a fix could be rather tricky, which might be a long era of trial and error.

The solution? After you analyze with historical data, best to back it up with the additional strategy of usability testing. Usability testing is with human subjects, and might give you more insight how your customers are reacting emotionally (and why we leave your site.)

What strategies landing page optimization is used for.

• Helps make your website sticky: First impressions are important. Not all browsers will land onto your ’splash’ page. Make sure that every page in your website gives them a clear indication as to where to go next, AND what the page they landed on is about.
• Helps you build trust: Building trust starts with the first page your customers ever see. If your customers find information that is very useful on your website with the very first page they come to, average number of pages viewed per visitors goes WAY up.

How we help.

If you find your website has traffic but nothing comes of it, landing page optimization is a great place to start. We’ve worked the analytics, we’ve dialed in the pages, we’ve watched the sales grow. Let us help you with landing page optimization.