Making Your Landing Pages Work Successfully

Creating landing pages that work is vital if you want to leverage the qualified traffic that you have received to that page and increase conversion rates. However, far too often landing pages are created and then forgotten, with little or no analysis being done as to whether the pages are successful in attracting and converting potential customers.

Using your website analytics tool and traffic statistics can help to highlight problems, understand their causes and begin to resolve any issues that are being caused with your landing pages.

a) Look at your most visited content and pages. It may be that you need to move the most important pages up the hierarchy of your website architecture so that they can be found more easily by both casual website visitors and search engine robots. Additionally, adding more links from other websites and internal pages can help to increase visibility.

b) Bounce rate. Are site visitors leaving unexpectedly from specific landing pages? In which case, these pages are not doing their job and you need to assess why this may be. It could be poorly written text, confusing layout, unclear calls to action, or a failure to communicate the key messages.

c) Exit and entry pages. The stats about these pages are extremely important. These are the pages on your website which create the first and last impression for your site visitors. Your top exit pages urgently need fixing and should be a priority. Your entry pages are fundamental in guiding your website visitors to the right place on your site for their needs, and yours, so these need to be clean, well-written and ensure that your calls to action are heeded.

d) Reader journeys. This is the path that people take through your website. You should look at the most common paths through your website, and establish whether these are leading to successful completion of your goals eg a sale, phone call inquiry, completion of a contact us form, download of a white paper, newsletter sign up etc. You can then decide whether the reader journey or funnel is too long-winded, whether your response pages or key conversion points are in the wrong place, or rejig your site navigation to reduce the most common visitor goals to a shorter path.

e) Search terms. These are the terms that people have used in the search engines in order to find your site. Don't just look at the last month of terms, and avoid becoming too caught up with the top terms. If you look back historically at your search terms, and in particular those with a low number of searches, you may find that there are key phrases and words which over time have brought in significant amounts of traffic. These are the 'long tail' terms and can prove highly profitable as they often bring in qualified niche searchers who prove to be high converters. Optimizing landing pages for these terms can bring in good results, and are often less competitive, meaning a few pennies spent on PPC can bring astounding results.

Simply by taking a few minutes to assess your landing page traffic can help you to understand what is working and what isn't. Minor tweaks can often fix problems which are causing your visitors to leave unnecessarily, and give a better return on investment for the money you spend on driving traffic to those pages.