Lowering bounce rate and raising conversion rate – Landing page edition
Modern SEM practices suggest that lowering bounce rates and raising conversion rates are both key to putting giant smiley faces on your web revenue forecasts. Rankings don’t mean much when your visitors bounce off to spend their money somewhere else. Some might argue that improving bounce rate and conversion rate is more about web analytics or even overall online marketing, but come on, we all know it’s more than that.
This is the fourth of a five part series detailing five major factors in boosting the effectiveness of your SEM. The first part, on boosting targeted traffic, can be found here. The second part, on identifying and directing visitor intent, can be found here. The third part, on usability, can be found here.
Landing page optimization
What’s a landing page? Leading usability and SEO experts will tell you every page is a landing page, in the same way every meeting is a chance to make an impression. However, the old-school definition is a page that was created for a singular purpose, or to attract a particular audience.
In the dark ages, webmasters would attract users to their front page. Hoping upon hopes that someone would see that singular link somewhere. Times have changed. Nowadays, potential consumers can be led to any part of your site through any number of different avenues. Sort of like cockroaches. Only, these are the kinds of cockroaches you actually want to start hanging out in your cupboards.
As a matter of fact, deep links are now more popular than front pages. You should optimize your website accordingly. But how? You know the drill. Read on.
1. Create – Create landing pages for organic traffic, long tail queries and important social media sites like Twitter, not just for PPC and banner ads. This will reap huge dividends.
2. Simplify – Keep your landing pages simple, but not too simple. You don’t want your visitors to think you are the e-village idiot. It’s certainly a fine-line but you’ll get the hang of it.
3. Build trust – Add signs of trust to your site. Embed badges from professional organizations, user reviews and endorsements from recognizable names. Note: Do not just make these up. Fact-checking is easier than ever in 2010 Internet.
4. Do not distract – Keep your landing pages free of distractions. Minimize pitfalls, ads and other annoyances. However, this is null and void if the purpose of your site is to get ad-clicks. In that case, go hog wild.
5. Test – Test your landing pages frequently. Do this by visiting from a variety of sources. You’ll be surprised by how many broken landing pages abound. If you notice a problem, fix it.
These tips will have your landing pages optimized in no time. Tune in next time when we’ll tackle A/B split testing otherwise known as multivariate testing.
Related Posts
- Lowering bounce rate and raising conversion rate – A/B split edition
- Lowering bounce rate and raising conversion rate – Usability edition
- Lowering bounce rate and raising conversion rate – Visitor intent edition
- Lowering bounce rate and raising conversion rate – Traffic edition
- Deduping Duplicate Content
