SUMMARY: The objective of your landing page is to get visitors to stay and look for more information or order your product but too many landing pages are like overcrowded bulletin boards. Your landing page should be simple, uncluttered and contain no more than two key brand messages that have been tested with your audience.
While bounce rates, alone, are not a good KPI for your website it could tell you a lot about your landing page. If your bounce rate is really high for your landing page either your keywords are wrong or people are overwhelmed with too many sales messages. The landing page is perhaps the most important page on your website. Here are some things to consider:
1ne: Attention spans on the Internet are non-existent. people will usually give you 3-5 seconds to determine if they are going to go deeper in your site.
2wo: Your landing page has to look good on both PC’s and mobile devices. You would be surprised how many landing pages look lousy on smartphones or Ipads.
3hree: Your landing page should be designed by and for your target audience. That doesn’t mean a broad target audience, it means those in your target audience who are going to go online and are the most likely prospects to convert to customers.
So what are landing page best practices?
1ne: Keep it simple – no more than one or two TESTED messages that resonate to your audience.
2wo: Avoid too many calls to action
3hree: Use intuitive navigation. That is navigation based on how people are going through the conversion process not on what you want to tell them.
4our: One prominent call to action but remember to give them the option to “learn more”. Remember its’ about users, not you.
5ive: Keep images simple or use short content video.
6ix: Don’t use bright colors. Set the tone for your site with eye-pleasing layouts and colors.
7even: If you’re selling something, include some review highlights but remember that people are going to check other reviews at other sites.
8ight: If you use cookies let people know and let people know how you are going to use their data.
9ine: Your landing page doesn’t always have to be your website homepage. If, for example, you are answering some questions about a product or service your google keywords should direct people to that page, not to your website homepage.
All you have to do is go to various websites to see how bad some homepages really are. Good websites continually experiment and optimize their homepages for the benefit of its visitors not because they want to shout “buy me”.
