Creating and optimizing your landing page is not only essential for a good user experience, it’s a critical step if you hope to drive conversions. A landing page is the first page a user will see when they visit your website through an external route – i.e. Google AdWords, a social media network, or a digital advertising campaign. The idea behind your landing page should be to convert as many users and/or customers to engage with your website as possible; whether it’s via reading your content, signing up for your newsletter, or even purchasing a product or service.
Monetate’s EQ3 2017 Report analyzed over 37 million return purchases in order to help you, as an online business, establish where, when, and why customers abandon their carts, and return goods/services. Information like this can be invaluable to learning more about your industry and where you should focus your attention in order to continue engaging with your customers. This information, along with a high-converting landing page, could be your key to success.
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Contextual Content
Any high-converting landing page will contain meaningful and relevant content. As a user, if you see an advert for women’s dresses, you expect the link you click on to take you to a webpage about women’s dresses. If you arrive at said webpage and the content is irrelevant to your expectations, you’re going to leave the page, aren’t you?
If you’re using Google AdWords, or aiming high on Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP), your meta title and meta description are the first things that people will see, even before they’ve reached your landing page.
As you can see, the blue text is your meta title, and the text underneath is your meta description. Both of these elements should be relevant and engaging to your potential website visitors; don’t be afraid to experiment a little and be creative, but always check back to ensure your content is appropriate for your website.
When we talk about content, we don’t just mean written text, contextual content also applies to images – essentially it applies to anything that a user can see on your website. Hero images can be utilized, alongside engaging written content, to increase your conversion rate. Often being one of the first things you see when you hit a landing page, hero images are the large images, banners, or photos that are visible at the top. Hero images pop out immediately, so make sure that yours is unique and captures your visitor’s attention from the moment they see it.
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Ease of Use / User Experience
Now that your website is generating traffic, you’ll want to ensure that your visitors enjoy a flawless user experience; if not, they will go elsewhere. A simple user journey that makes sense is your key to success here – your landing page should not be complicated or difficult for your customers to convert. We have some tips and tricks that you can use to your advantage to ensure your landing page results in high conversions.
- Reduce Downtime & Increase Speed: There are lots of things you can do to make sure your website has as little downtime as possible, and is fast as lightning. But, what it really comes down to is who your website is hosted by. Finding a reliable web host that offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee, excellent customer support, and is affordable is essential for your landing page. Speed matters – if your landing page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, your conversion rate is going to decrease massively.
- Use a Content Management System (CMS): Many CMS platforms, like WordPress, can be used to your advantage, especially if you’ve never created a website before. There are literally thousands of pre-built website templates available at the click of a button, including responsive designs to ensure your website’s user experience never fails. Most web hosts now offer dedicated plans and packages for the likes of WordPress, including 1-click installs to get you started straight away.
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The Best Offer
Everyone wants something for free, and the same applies to converting your website’s visitors. When a user visits your website, you’re asking them to do something, whether it’s signing up for a newsletter, or purchasing a product. What’s going to entice them to choose you over a competitor?
Let’s take newsletters as an example; you want to keep your website users engaged, so you’re going to send them a newsletter every week. That’s all well and good, but why should your visitors sign up to your newsletter? If you offer your visitors something in return, they are more likely to convert. If they sign up to your newsletter, they’ll receive a 10% off voucher for your goods or services – now they’re interested!
You could even turn your landing page into a competition; keep the content relevant, but remind your visitors why they should choose you, and in return, they’ll be in with a chance of winning something that excites them, and is meaningful.
There is no absolute trick in guaranteeing high-conversions, but through lots of research, we hope that these 3 critical elements will put you one step ahead of the game into creating a high-converting landing page for your website.
About the Author
Jann is a Content Writer at ukwebhostreview.com – She is committed to providing all you need to know about technology along with researching and analysing the best hosting providers.
