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Many times, landing pages tend to get stuck in a time warp. They’re created and like an abandoned to-do list, only visited sporadically when the urge hits. You could be leaving prospects on the table or worse yet, turning them off, if your landing page is not relevant.

For example, right now, many economies worldwide are shaky; these are not exactly boom times. Does your landing page reflect that? Or, was it created during more robust economic times, and the language reflects that.

Landing Page Optimization Tip: Use What’s Current to Connect with Your Customers

A simple way to ensure that your landing page connects with customers is to state the obvious. For example, let’s say your company puts on webinars for traveling salesmen.

A simple question on your site could be, “Are these trying economic times hurting your bottom line?”

Right up front you’ve let the customer know that you realize things are difficult and your company is doing everything it can to help them cut costs and increase profits. Then, you could go on to tout the benefits of having webinars, as opposed to live events, eg:

Saves on travel expenses;

Can log on at your convenience;

Can be done from anywhere;

Etc.

Landing Page Optimization Advice: Stay Current to Stay Ahead

Landing pages are not static entities. They are a fluid part of your content marketing efforts and should be revisited, revised and updated to reflect what’s going on with your target market – today.

One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, five one thousand, six one thousand, seven one thousand.

By the time you read the above, according to many internet marketing studies, visitors to your landing page have decided whether or not they’re going to click away from your site.

In essence, you have roughly seven seconds to hook visitors. And unfortunately, many internet marketers cause visitors to run from their sites by making simple mistakes, after spending so much to get them to land there.

Are You Making Your Prospects Work Too Hard to Give You Money?

One of the most common landing page optimization mistakes is what can be called a kind of “keyword bait and switch.” But not the obvious kind, eg, using keywords totally unrelated to the page. This landing page optimization mistake is much more subtle, but just as damaging.

For example, let’s say you sell women’s handbags. One of your keywords is “women’s beaded evening bags.” But when prospects click through from entering that search phrase, they’re taken to a general landing page with all kinds of women’s handbags.

While beaded handbags may be a category on the page, visitors have to search for it.

Keep in mind that long-tail keywords tend to convert at a higher rate than more general ones. So if a prospect has typed in a highly descriptive keyword phrase like the one above, chances are, she’s looking to make a specific purchase.

Get her to the information she needs as quickly as possible. Don’t make her “work” (ie, search) for it. You risk losing the sale.

Use Landing Page Optimization Tools to Find Out Your Bounce Rates & Fix Them

There are a plethora of landing page optimization tools that can help you test your pages to discern your bounce rate. They range in price from $0 to expensive, high-end technology. And, they can do everything from tracking eye movements to generating heat maps on a page.

Tip: One of the easiest ways to test the effectiveness of your landing page optimization strategies is via Google’s Analytics Bounce Rate metric.

How people read online is different from how they read via other mediums, eg, books, magazines, etc. This is known as eye tracking, and, if you’re not familiar with it, you could be missing out on sales and leads. Some simple insight into eye tracking can help you significantly improve your landing page optimization strategies.

What Is Eye Tracking?

Eye tracking is simply the process of documenting where a person is looking as they read a page online, for example. It has been widely adopted by many researchers in various fields (eg, psychology, cognitive linguistics, etc.) to help with things like product design and marketing.

The birth of eye tracking can be traced back to the late 19^th century when French ophthalmologist Louis Émile Javal made the observation that when people read, they don’t do so in a “smooth sweeping of the eyes along the text, as previously assumed, but they do so in a series of short stops (called fixations) and quick saccades.”

This caused many to examine and question how people read, eg, which words do their eyes stop on, for how long, when do readers double back to previously seen words, etc.?

How Eye Tracking Can Help Improve Landing Page Optimization

Fast forward to the 21^st century; many studies have been conducted on eye tracking in relation to web page design. Following are some findings gleaned by Eyetrack III in a study released by the Poynter Institute that can help you better design your landing pages.

Where prospects look first on a page: This study found that participants most often looked at the upper left-hand part of a page. Then after a bit, they moved to the right. Only after giving a thorough look to these portions of the page did they begin to look further down.

How can you use this information to better optimize your landing page? Put your benefits-oriented offer/information in the upper part of the page. This way, prospects are sure to get – immediately — what you can do for them.

Graphics, Text & Multimedia: Another thing this survey found was that text – as opposed to graphics – won the day with participants. It found specifically that “dominant headlines” are what drew most participants’ attention when they first landed on a page. And, if this headline was in the upper left-hand segment of the page, all the better. Headlines also worked well in the upper right.

How can you use this information to improve your landing page optimization techniques? Simple — scratch the graphics, video and other multi-media you might want to put here and get busy writing a full-fledged, benefits-oriented headline.

These are just two findings from a very limited study on eye tracking. Imagine if you spent some time delving into it a bit more? You could significantly improve your landing page ROI by learning things like page “hotspots,” where to put call to action statements, what to do about graphics, etc.

Find out more about how to use eye-tracking to improve your website.