Nothing can undermine the effectiveness of a pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaign like a bad landing page (also called “marketing page” in the industry). You could send the most qualified traffic to it, only to have your hot prospects bouncing off to a page they can truly relate to. Since we don’t want you to do that, we’re giving you ten quick and helpful tips that will improve the quality of your marketing pages so that you don’t have to worry about throwing your money away.
1. Make It Specific
What demographic are you targeting? Where do they live? What kinds of unique products and services are they looking for? A good landing page will clearly answer all of these questions for a unique type of visitor that you are driving to it via PPC keywords and text ads. Never think of a landing page as a multi-purpose page. A real estate broker who tries to sell homes in all of Arizona on one page will have a much harder time convincing potential clients that he is a local expert than one who sets up a custom-tailored marketing page for every community in Arizona he serves.
2. Make It Current
You don’t have to real the news headlines and update your landing page every day, but it never hurts to ride the waves of holiday sentimentality and construct pages that run promotions geared towards those nationally treasured occasions. Also, stop using “Welcome to Anytown!” on your landing page, it’s not 1997 any longer!
3. De-Sleaze It
Unless successful sales tactics for your industry dip into car salesman-like depths of moral compass, there’s no sense to try and amp up your landing page with cliched buzz words. Believe it or not, the first thing web shoppers are trying to do is quickly find out if your site is “full of it” or not. If the marketing page contains little factual information or appealing offers, you can rest assured that your visitors will bounce faster than one of those rubber balls you buy out of a quarter machine at the grocery store.
4. Earn the Trust of Your Visitors
Is your landing page doing all it can to assure those who see it that you are worthy of their trust? Do you have current client testimonials on it? Do your forms contain privacy disclaimers and anti-spam logos? Is a human picture on it? Making the page as “human” as possible with pictures, quotes, and statements that bring the complexities of your online order system down to a better comfort zone will only increase your conversions.
5. Follow Eye Drift
Ah, the magic of our ingrained cultural tendencies. Since the western world reads from left to right and from top to bottom, it surfs pages nearly the same way. Below your header, if you have one, you should always have the most important image or offer in the upper left corner. That’s where people are looking for grounding, that this page contains exactly what they were looking for. To the right is where you want to hit them with an opportunity to convert immediately, if you haven’t already given them the chance. A side note with eye drift: even though the above example is two-column, single column formats can work really well too with this because they force the visitor to follow the page straight down.
6. Label It Properly
Did you title the page with the keywords and text ad offer that referred the visitor to it? Are your meta keywords and description also in line with them? And what about your h1 tags? If you don’t make sure the entire landing page delivers the right language to the visitor, not only does it increase the chances that they will bounce, but there’s also a good chance the search engines (like Google) will penalize you with a poor quality score for having what appears to be an irrelevant marketing page to the keywords you’ve bid on. And the end result of that is less visitors at a higher average cost-per-click (CPC).
7. Keep It Above the Fold
If your visitors can’t see it right away, there’s a good chance they won’t ever. Don’t ever assume that even a majority of your traffic will take the time to scroll down the page. Put everything that’s important in the top 500 or so pixels of the page. That way you can rest assured that most browsers will display all the information you need your prospective buyers to consider, and maximize your chances of making an impression.
8. Ample Opportunity to Convert
What good is all the information your qualified online shoppers are looking for without frequent and compelling chances for them to do business with you right away. Unless your industry usually makes “soft sales,” we recommend hitting people with an offer right after your first piece of information. Whether it be a picture of your featured product, or a well-worded introduction to your company, it never hurts to let the people who are ready to buy now do so.
9. Optimized Forms
Are your forms asking for too much information? Do they ask for information over several forms, allowing for individual customization of each user’s opt-in to your offer? The more you make the forms simple, nice looking, functional, easy to understand, and capable of reacting correctly to input, the less likely you are going to have people leave the page because your page is either too confusing or intrusive.
10. Make It Legible
This could very well be the most important tip in the list. Are your fonts white on black, black on white, or another high-contrast pairing? Do you avoid the overuse of italics and small type size? Are your paragraphs well-formatted? Are they free of spelling and grammar mistakes? If all of these conditions are not met, you are selling your campaign short by making your landing page difficult to read, and therefore less compelling.
BigSERP runs effective internet marketing campaigns of all shapes and sizes, operating on the west side of Los Angeles, California.