by Joanna Taylor
Last Updated: January 3, 2024
A great landing page is at the core of every successful online business’s conversion and lead generation. In fact, websites with multiple landing pages generate 55% more leads than those with fewer.
Unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to attract and retain user attention these days. Competition is stiff and consumer expectations are high.
Is your landing page seeing a high bounce rate? I’ll show you 12 effective and practical landing page optimization tips you can follow to fix this.
Table of contents
Landing page optimization is the process of refining a landing page to boost conversion and acquire more qualified leads.
This could mean enhancing the page’s design or user experience in a way that encourages visitors to give information, make a purchase, or sign up for a service.
When building a landing page, it’s important to ensure that each element is designed to guide the user to take the desired action.
From the headline to the images and call-to-action (CTA), everything should work together to minimize friction and drive engagement.
The major goal is to build a landing page that:
Unlike other pages on your website, your landing page is designed for a single purpose. To drive sales and generate revenue!
This is often where you send everyone from your paid marketing campaigns. Since you’ll be spending a lot of resources to drive people to this page, optimizing it for conversion is critical to the success of your campaigns.
It’s also a smart way to lower your customer acquisition costs significantly.
There’s really no one-size-fits-all approach to landing page optimization. In most cases, you’ll need to do some split testing to achieve the best results.
At this stage, you want to make informed decisions based on real-time data from your website. This is the best way to prove what works for your unique business case.
Not sure where to get started?
Here are 12 evergreen landing page optimization best practices (backed with relevant stats and examples) that I’ve used to run high-converting landing pages over the years.
A simple landing page is mostly all you need to win a potential customer’s heart. This applies to both the design and the text.
Some of the best-performing landing pages focus mostly on gaining the visitor’s attention with few but highly effective words.
The idea is to avoid creating a visual clutter and keep the spotlight on the CTA.
The cheat code to creating a simple landing page is to concentrate on benefits instead of features.
Put yourself in the user’s position and answer their major pain points. All while limiting the number of actions on the page!
A good example is this MicroConf Europe page below. In a few words and a simple layout, the page highlights the conference’s biggest selling point—its size and reputation.
The visitor can easily watch the introductory video to learn more about the conference.
No need to scroll through several lines of distracting text. In essence, just give the customers what they want. More details can then follow suit ‘below the fold.’
In landing page optimization terminology, ‘above the fold’ refers to everything in the upper half of your landing page.
In essence, this is what the visitor sees before scrolling down the page.
All your buyer needs to make a well-informed decision and carry out the desired action should go here.
This typically includes:
This Slack landing page demonstrates the right way to place landing page elements excellently.
The best way to start your landing page optimization process is to leverage insights from the page analytics.
This will help you to identify what’s presently not working. Google Analytics has a powerful module called “Landing page report.”
This module automatically tracks the pages with the highest traffic on your website. You’ll be able to see the:
Even better, you can use a visual report like a heatmap to learn more about target audience behavior.
With this analytical tool, you’ll be able to know which areas of the page users click the most.
You’ll also discover the most persuasive part of your offer and the existing barriers stopping users from taking action.
This helps you to decide how to improve the page elements with minimum traction. Hotjar has a free heatmap tool you may want to check out.
On the other hand, Google has a Page Analytics add-on for Chrome which also includes a heat mapping feature.
Other important visual reports include scroll maps, overlay reports, and list reports.
As a rule of thumb, your CTA button or link text should be the most straightforward part of your entire page.
Trying to be creative here is pretty counterproductive. If you need them to register for a course, then a simple “Register Now” will do the job.
Ambiguous words not only confuse the user, but they also lack a sense of urgency which is a critical component of any great sales pitch.
Your CTA copy should generally include action phrases that are known to maximize conversion.
In certain cases where the action isn’t particularly attractive, generic phrases like “Get Started” may help.
Ideally, you should also feature only one CTA button per page for the best results. A Wordstream report shows that doing this can boost clicks by 371%.
When designing and optimizing your landing page, it’s important to consider the content of your other marketing copies as well.
For example, you may be sending prospective customers to this page from a Pay Per Click (PPC) ad or social media ad.
Make sure the offer on your landing page matches the user’s intent when they clicked the link on their previous interaction.
To achieve the best results, your entire marketing campaign should be a wholesome cohesive journey.
This means elements like the messaging, branding, and style should be similar across the board.
There’s been a lot of debate about the best colors to use for your CTA buttons.
But in my landing page optimization experience, I’ve discovered that the real determining factor is the contrast, not the color in itself.
Using color contrast effectively helps to drive attention where you want it to go.
A good example is this Glowright landing page.
It uses a good color contrast system to highlight the:
Of course, you shouldn’t neglect your unique brand color scheme in pursuit of contrast.
It’s important you maintain consistency with your color and font choices on all your site pages.
Buying is entirely a game of emotions. Social proof can be your major trump card in this game.
Whether it’s in the B2B or B2C sector, a prospective buyer wants to see that other consumers like them are satisfied using your products or services.
Doing this helped Augmentive increase its landing page conversion rate by 68%.
The easiest way to implement this is to add testimonials and ratings from credible platforms like Google and Trustpilot.
This is why our main landing page has a testimonial section that not only includes reviews from top users.
It also highlights the strength of our customer base and the type of clients we presently cater to.
Users leave web pages for different reasons. No matter how irresistible your offer and page design are, they may not be enough to sell a customer on the first attempt.
This is where exit popups come in handy in landing page optimization. A popup serves as your final shot at landing a sale.
So, it may be a good idea to propose a rare offer. It could be a significant percentage discount, Buy One Get One Free (BOGOF), or a limited free trial.
If you can’t afford to do any of this, then you can simply use the popup to collect information (email addresses, phone numbers, etc.) or get the user to sign up for your newsletter.
This can set the perfect foundation for retargeted ads.
Irrespective of how compelling your landing page design and copy are, it’ll never convert if users never get to see it. Internet users are getting more and more impatient.
At most, nobody wants to wait more than 5 seconds for a website page to load. Google recommends 2 seconds.
Loading times are particularly important on mobile devices.
In my experience, your web host is the most critical factor that determines your page speed.
If you’re just starting out, Siteground’s shared hosting should work just fine. But once you begin to expand and acquire global visitors, I highly recommend opting for a cloud hosting solution.
This is your surest path to achieving sub-1-second page loading times. You can get 512MB RAM cloud hosting for as low as $4/month.
Other tips for boosting page speed include:
To test how your pages are performing, use free resources like GTmetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights.
They also offer tips on how to improve your results.
Marketers have always used the Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) effect to drive sales and conversion. You too can leverage this with a limited-time offer.
Even in traditional marketing, advertisers use terms like “Offer is valid while stock lasts.”
In digital marketing, that translates to phrases like “limited quantity,” “3 left in stock,” and “limited-time deal.”
You can add a countdown timer somewhere on your landing page to depict scarcity.
An important part of landing page optimization is not just getting the customer to buy your pitch, but also to act now!
You might be tempted to optimize your landing page for paid marketing campaigns only.
But it’s interesting to note that the majority of landing pages also rank well in organic search.
This means a lot of internet users are already finding landing pages through search engines.
It’s therefore important to not miss out on this cost-effective marketing channel. You can start by incorporating keywords relevant to both your brand and niche or industry.
Use tools like Moz, SEMrush, and Ahrefs to find optimal SERP ranking opportunities. You typically want to look out for low-competition keywords with medium to high search volume.
Once you’ve decided on the right keywords, find a clever way to distribute them into your headlines, image alt text, and meta description naturally.
If you’re using WordPress, check out this article to learn how to use Yoast SEO and OptimizePress to boost your on-page SEO.
Probably the most important takeaway from this guide is the fact that landing page optimization isn’t a one-off task.
It’s important that you continuously look for ways to improve your landing page conversion rate. This will require experimenting repeatedly.
We’ve already talked about how crucial measuring analytics metrics is.
Once you’re done with the initial optimization, you’ll also need to keep making data-based decisions.
This is where A/B split testing comes in. This simply means showing two different versions of your site to different customers.
You’ll then track their performance to see which converts better.
Popular landing page elements you may want to test include:
Keep experimenting and keep optimizing. This is the only way to have a landing page that keeps converting.
Unlock Higher Conversion Rates: Get Access to 120+ Landing Page Swipes from Creators, Digital Marketers and Experts in our latest Landing Page Lookbook
Get Access to 120+ Landing Page Swipes from Creators, Digital Marketers and Experts + insights and steps to boost your landing page conversions.
Our on-demand demo shows how OptimizePress can power your complete digital marketing business.