Why Isn’t My Landing Page Converting? A Beginner’s Guide to Landing Page Optimization (Part 2)
Welcome to the second part of our guide to landing page optimization!
The first part of this series covered the basics and now, it’s time to focus on the specifics for B2B, PPC, SEO, and mobile landing pages.
A lot of your success depends on things that will happen during your web design phase — such as content planning which will determine your landing page’s layout, flow, and copy.
We’ll also delve into a bit of digital advertising and SEO, since they’ll affect your landing page’s conversion rates as well.
Let’s dive in!
Best practices for B2B landing pages
This first part is for businesses who sell to other businesses (and not to consumers). Appiloque, being a digital marketing agency, would be an example of a B2B company — since our clients are businesses who are looking to market themselves digitally.
Here’s what works for a B2B landing page:
Write specific copy
When it comes to B2B landing pages, precision is everything.
Every single landing page should be specifically created with the visitor’s customer journey stage and intent in mind.
Skip the generic introductory stuff you’d tell someone who’s at the start of their customer journey.
For instance, if you’re setting up a landing page for middle of the funnel customers, you don’t have to tell them why they need your product.
Chances are, they already know.
They’re just shopping around for the best option on the market.
Focus on your conversion goal
Think of the one thing you want visitors to do and work from there.
- Only feature one call-to-action (CTA) per landing page
- For every other campaign message, create a separate landing page (this is worth the effort!)
- Proactively address questions regarding the next step that you want your visitor to take
Use testimonials
These should be front and center on your landing page.
If you don’t have any, go and get some.
There’s no point in putting up fake “stock” testimonials — educated visitors will be able to see through them, and it’ll just hurt your brand’s credibility.
When your potential customers see that you have plenty of satisfied users (who are just like them and their company), they’ll be more likely to place their trust in you.
Otherwise, they may go looking for reviews online and never come back.
You can display your social proof as:
- Numbers: The amount of revenue generated with your tool, the total number of clients, etc.
- Quotes from customers: Related to the intent of your landing page and that of your visitors. Bonus points if you can get one from a key decision maker!
- Name-drops: Logos of companies using your products or services
Here’s a quick recap:
Best practices for PPC landing pages
When you’re designing pay-per-click landing pages, the stakes are high.
After all, you’re spending spending money on a paid advertisement campaign and you want to convert as many visitors as possible. So, here’s what you can do:
Ensure a match between your ad & landing page
Don’t set up an ad only to direct potential customers to a general page like homepage or a directory page.
Instead, make sure your landing page is dedicated, corresponding to what you talked about in the ad, and related to the searcher’s intent.
Your landing page messaging should always match your ad messaging.
If it doesn’t, they’ll leave immediately and that won’t bode well on your bounce rate.
Focus on your conversion goal
Everyone who clicked your ad has a goal they want to achieve with the help of your product or service. The fact that they even landed on your page indicates their interest.
Here’s your opportunity to:
- Make an enticing offer
- Make the landing page as distraction-free as possible
- Remove menus and navigation (consider breadcrumbs instead)
- Emphasize the benefits the customers will experience with your products
For example, if you’re running an ad for bottom of the funnel customers, avoid extra information and skip straight to the sweet stuff you promised in the ad.
Set up dynamic ads
The majority of PPC platforms offer dynamic ads which automatically adapt to different target audience groups.
Make sure you use them, and direct the corresponding visitors to appropriate landing pages.
For example, if you ran an ad for a project management software for both professional and untrained project managers, make sure you have a dynamic ad stating different benefits, as well as two separate landing pages.
Practice retargeting
Finally, be sure to install the Google remarketing tag or Facebook pixel on your landing page.
This will help you reach visitors who were interested enough to visit your page, but not interested enough to take an action.
You can also be much more specific with your retargeting ad creative, allowing you to win over the customers you thought you’d lost.
But remember, always exclude the visitors who have followed through with your conversion goal. You don’t want to waste your advertising budget on people who have already converted!
On Facebook, you can easily do this via your Ads Manager:
We’ve covered a few of the main optimization best practices for PPC landing pages, but in short:
Best practices for SEO landing pages
Traffic from search engines is organic (not paid), but that doesn’t mean you should neglect your SEO landing page. Here are some best practices to bring those conversion numbers up.
Ensure a match between the search query & landing page
As always, great content is a must. But more specifically, make sure your content corresponds to the search query and the intent behind that query.
Here’s how to run a quick test:
Google for something that is likely to showcase your landing page as a result. For instance, in our case, it might be something like “web design company”, or “digital marketing agency”.
Next, ask yourself:
- Does the content on your page relate back to the search query?
- Are you giving your visitors a good (and clear) reason to convert?
- Are you interested to stick around or would you close the page right away?
If you’re unable to give a resounding yes to any of these questions, you’ve got some work to do!
Use the right keywords
Before we go further into this, here’s a quick rundown on why keywords are even necessary:
Placing your keywords in certain areas (where the spiders are looking) on your landing page will help you optimize it for SEO.
Now, don’t start spamming your keywords. Place them in these areas, but make the reading experience as natural as possible:
- Body text
- Headers
- Page title
- URL
- Meta description
Get your meta title & description done right
This is basically nerd language for your page’s title and description:
Besides helping Google’s spiders know what your landing page is about, it’s also your one opportunity to tell people what your page is about.
Because meta titles and descriptions form the first impression people have of your page, this will help them decide whether or not they should visit your landing page.
In summary:
Best practices for mobile landing pages
With more and more visitors coming from mobile, it’s incredibly important to optimize your landing page for mobile users.
Aim for simplicity and usability
With mobile landing pages, simplicity and usability are key:
- Create mobile-friendly forms: As little fields as possible; avoid desktop functions like dropdown menus. And if you’re asking for a contact number, customize the input field to automatically switch to the numerical keyboard when your visitor clicks on it.
- Simplify your landing page: Include only the most important information and appropriate CTA buttons)
- Reduce the number of distracting links and elements
Consider screen constraints
Another thing to keep in mind for mobile landing pages are the screen constraints of mobile devices. Place the most important or most enticing information above the fold (the portion of the page before scrolling).
You can also use a scrolling CTA button or a sticky navigation. No matter where on the page your visitors are, they’ll have a clear way of proceeding with their conversion.
In our case, we’ve chosen to do it at the bottom of the screen, which makes it easier for users to tap on:
Be careful with your font size as well — you don’t want to make your visitors squint. Fonts on a mobile landing page should be at least 16 pixels, for easy readability.
Other web design tips for mobile landing pages
Finally, you can use some of these tips to help you increase your conversion rate:
- Make sure your CTA contrasts with the rest of the page (e.g. having black text on a white background with an orange CTA helps with visibility, especially for people who use their mobile devices in natural outdoor light)
- Use single-column layouts, bullet points and white space
- Remove unnecessary videos and media elements that will cause your page to slow down
- Use exit popups and forms that fit nicely within mobile screens
To put it simply:
Get better at landing page optimization
If you’d like to learn more about landing page optimization, check out our other piece on web design best practices to increase conversions — they may apply to web design in general, but they’re highly applicable for landing pages too.
Or if you’d like clarity on what’s wrong with your landing page, get in touch with us!
We do help clients with heatmap tracking and analysis — something that’s really helpful in telling you how actual visitors are interacting with your page. With that, it becomes a whole lot easier to eliminate the guesswork :)
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