You spend hours perfecting your keyword list to capture the highest quality traffic. You spend days creating the perfect set of ads to run in your beautifully organized PPC account. You spend even more time creating even better ads to A/B test against your initial perfect set of ads. You spend weeks pouring over the data and optimizing your PPC account to bring in the best conversion rates at the lowest cost.
But before all that, how much time did you set aside to optimize your landing pages?
A good landing page turns visitors into customers. A poor landing page results in high bounce rates and low conversions. Don’t overlook this very important piece to the PPC puzzle. Take a look at your landing pages to see if you’re following these six simple guidelines.
1. Visual Appeal
Create a visually appealing, but not overwhelming landing page. You only have a few seconds to get your message across before a visitor decides to bounce. Make those seconds count! You want your potential customer to find the information quickly without any confusion. Create a page that is clean, easy to follow, and aesthetically pleasing.
2. Clear Action
What do you want the searcher to do? Give you an email address? Buy a product? Call you to schedule an appointment or get more information? All of those things require an action. Make it easy for that searcher to perform the action! Place the conversion element so that it can be clearly seen when the page loads without scrolling. Make it large enough, enticing enough, that it feels to the searcher that it’s the obvious thing to do.
3. Compelling Content
Design compelling headlines and content above the fold so that visitors don’t have to scroll. Chances are, they won’t. The important pieces to your page should appear at the top of your page to make sure that visitors see the information on page load. Create excitement through your headlines, imagery, and page text, and be clear about what you want the visitor to do next.
4. Mobile Friendliness
Make your landing page mobile-friendly. The majority of searchers use mobile devices, and have since 2015. If your landing page is not mobile-optimized, visitors will bounce immediately to find a page that is. Don’t miss out on potentially converting traffic just because your landing page is device-specific!
5. Quick Delivery
User experience doesn’t end with mobile-friendliness, though. The speed with which your landing page loads also impacts your user experience … as well as your quality score and advertising costs. If you want to test page speed and learn more about how to optimize it, Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool is a great place to start.
6. Clear Contacts
Make sure that your business contact information is clearly visible at the top of your landing pages. Ideally, it should be placed at the top right corner of the landing page. The addition of a phone number gives users a sense of security. Your business feels more trustworthy with contact information prominently displayed.
Advertising online is an investment. Focus some of your valuable time on creating a landing page that converts, and you’ll see a larger return on that investment.
Editor’s note: This article was originally posted on May 8, 2017, and was substantially updated on Oct. 3, 2019.
