5 Great Ways to Optimise Your Landing Page

Your landing page is your first point of contact with nearly every potential client, whether they’re accessing your website from their laptop, tablet or mobile device. And while the Information Age prizes many virtues, patience is not among them. That means you have only seconds to make a compelling impression before your visitor finds a reason to go elsewhere.

So how do you optimise your opportunities? Here are 5 simple things you can do to make you landing page a lean, mean, marketing machine that will help you turn first-time visitors into long-time customers.

1. Grab your visitor’s attention

Anyone who’s grown up reading newspapers or seen the supermarket tabloids, knows the value of a strong headline. In fact, the headline may be the most important piece of copy on your website. So make it count.

A good header will tell your visitors what you do and, more importantly, what you can do for them, in just a few words. Keep it lean. And be sure that the words you choose highlight the primary strength of your business, whether it be speed, connectivity, ingenuity or customer care.

A good header will make visitors curious. It will hook them in and make them want to learn more about you and your business.

2. Keep it simple

Clutter is your enemy. If you remember little else, remember that. The most successful websites have clear, navigable, eye-catching designs that are free of clutter. You’re not designing a video game or a digital billboard for Times Square or Tokyo.

Keep the design clean enough to keep the visitor focused on what you want them to see: your logo, your headline, etc. Sliders and buttons should be easy to find, fonts should be reader-friendly and bucket copy should be clean and to the point. Bullet points are user-friendly, cumbersome blocks of text, not so much.

If your landing page does its job, there will be time to dazzle website visitors with verbal and visual pyrotechnics later on.

3. Make response easy

If there’s something you want visitors on your website to do, make sure you tell them to do it, and make it easy for them to do.

Contests and giveaways, for example, should be easy to enter. And your primary preferred contact — whether it’s email or phone or a brick and mortar store — should be prominent. Generally, the more a visitor must hunt to find something, the more likely they are to click away.

Also, if you want to build your social media following, make it easy for visitors to find you on the most traffic-heavy sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

4. A word about search

Search engines are becoming more sophisticated daily, which is good news. Cumbersome keyword strings and “keyword stuffing” are no longer the norm. So you can have elegant copy that both emphasises your company’s strength and improves your website’s search rank.

The first step is to know the search terms you want tied to your website. And a keyword in the header copy can help, if it doesn’t break the flow. Your text copy should include the main keywords you want search engines to see. And while bots don’t read for flow and context, your visitors do. So your landing page copy should heighten interest, inspire curiosity and motivate toward purchase.

5. Keep mobile in mind

With so many website visitors coming to your page via tablet or phone, you want to be sure your landing page is as appealing and easy to navigate on a small screen as it is on a laptop. That means that the most essential elements — logo, header, bullet copy and call-to-action — should be as easily viewed from any smartphone, as from a home computer.

Keep in mind, if your goal is to garner calls to your representatives, adding a click-to-call or support button for mobile users might be a good idea.

Conclusion

By keeping these tips in mind, you should be able to make the most of those precious few seconds when a new visitor arrives at your landing page.

SOURCE: 99 Designs