46 Landing Page Optimization Tips To Help You Decide What to Test

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Regular landing page optimization is one of the few clear cut ways to improve your marketing campaigns across the board. Optimizing your landing pages can increase conversions exponentially. More leads for your business equals more ROI for your bottom line.

Landing page optimization not only helps you bring in more conversions it helps you learn more about your target audience; what they prefer and what they don’t. It helps you paint a clearer picture of your audience and sharpens your overall marketing strategy.

First, understand that landing page optimization is far more simple than it makes itself out to be. The goal is to learn more about what our target audience prefers so we can do more of it and squeeze more conversions out of our campaigns.

While most marketers know they should be testing their landing pages, they often don’t. Instead they settle for mediocre results often because they don’t know what to test that will impact performance.

If you’re looking for landing page optimization help you’ve come to the right place.

In this article we’ve put together an exhaustive 46 tips to help you decide what to test when it comes to landing page optimization.

Clean and Clear Landing Page Template Design


The easier you make it for your web visitors to see who you are, what you’re offering, and what you’re asking in return, the  more likely that person is going to convert.

Obvious, right? You’d be surprised at how many businesses don’t get this – or just can’t effectively implement it.

Here are 7 tips to improve your landing page design for conversions:

1. Easy to navigate – Keep your page free of too much information, too many images and too much clutter. Avoid conversion drop-offs by making it easy to see why your visitor is on your page and what they need to do.

2. Bullet points – Your online visitors are skimmers and scanners. Make it easy to understand your benefits and more people will want what you’ve offering.

One of Wishpond landing page templates with easy-to-read bullet points.

landing pages
3. Whitespace – Use clean designs and direct your prospect’s attention to your offer, benefits and Call-to-Action. Leave empty space on your page to increase conversions.

4. Images – You know it – pictures tell a thousand words. This is particularly true online. Images are the most shared and liked content on social sites. They’re very effective on your lead-generating landing pages too. The more a potential customer likes your page, the more likely they’ll convert.

5. Complementary (and contrasting) colours – Colour design is extremely important in optimizing your landing page. Use complementary colour schemes to make your page appealing to the eye. Make your Call-to-Action in a contrasting colour to stand out.

landing page templates
If you don’t happen to have a graphic designer in house, there’s a number of free colour scheme tools online such as:

6. Above the fold – Keep your CTA, form fields and benefits ‘above the fold’. In other words, make sure all your pertinent landing page information can be seen on screen, without having to scroll down. (People don’t generally scroll – unless they’re very motivated to do so.)

7. 5 second rule – Yup, the ‘5 second rule’ applies to landing pages too. You’ve got about 5 seconds to attract and draw in your consumer. If your page doesn’t appeal immediately, your prospect will leave to other pages – maybe even your competitor’s!

Marketing on Your Landing Page


Your landing page is the hub of your marketing campaign. It’s where you direct traffic from online advertising, social media, email campaigns and so on. When traffic lands on your page, you need to market effectively to get your interested visitor to convert.

Here’s 7 tips to optimize your marketing tactics for conversions:

8. CTA – Your Call to Action (CTA) is the action you are asking your visitor to take. Your CTA should be the most prominent feature on your landing page. Make your Call to Action buttons clear, with contrasting colours. Keep them short, action-oriented words to invoke an immediate reaction. Show the obvious appeal or value exchange in your CTA – make yours an offer they can’t refuse.

Top action-getting CTA words include:

landing page template
9. Competitive advantage – Use your marketing smarts to succinctly show how and why you’re better than your competition. Use your company tagline or a unique selling point for your campaign. The more convincing you are to your market, the more leads and sales you’ll get.

10. Sense of urgency – Use scarcity tactics such as a limited supply of your product offering, limited time for your offer, or limited numbers for offer.

To create urgency, use phrases such as:

landing page template
11. “What’s in it for me?” – Answer your customer’s question by providing a convincing list of benefits your offer provides. Show that your product, service, coupon, contest or whatever it is you’re offering gives so much value that they simply can’t refuse. Show your value proposition with words and images on your landing page.

12. Know your offer – Before you create your landing page, determine what your offer is. Answer questions like:

  • What problem are you solving?
  • What are the specifics of your campaign?
  • How will your offer most benefit your customer – and why should they care?

13. Know your customer – In order to design and create a fully optimized landing page, you need to know who it is you’re marketing to. Make a list of demographics for your target market, or even write out a number of buyer personas that detail the daily behaviours of your intended consumer.

Make customer personas to understand your consumer and their online behaviours.

landing page template
The better you understand your customer, the more you can appeal to them.

14. Know your competition – It’s business. Check out your competition and do a competitive analysis for their landing page campaigns. Your research can serve two purposes: inspiration to outperform  their page, or generate creativity to innovate something unique.

Develop Trust and Consistency on Your Landing Page


Be upfront about who you are and keep consistent about your offer on your landing page. You’ll gain more trust by clearly communicating your business and what you provide. The more a person trusts you, the more likely they’ll be prepared to convert.

Here’s 7 tips to increase trust on your campaign landing page:

15. Contact information – Show your phone number, social network links, and even the address and a map and of your location. The more accessible you are, the more friendly and ‘open for business’ you look. Don’t hide from your customer if you want their business.

Example of renovation landing page with a clear phone number in the upper left hand corner.

landing page template
16. Don’t oversell – Perhaps I learned this lesson the hard way. I spent nearly a decade working in politics (yeah, need I say more?). Don’t over-promise only to under-deliver. That is the fastest way to lose trust – and customers. Say what you’re offering, and give your customers what you’ve promised. Once they’ve got what they want – then give them a little more. You may be pleasantly surprised at the word-of-mouth marketing you gain.

17. Keep your campaign consistent – This seems pretty obvious, but when you’re running a marketing campaign, make sure whatever your promotion is about remains the same through your sales funnel. This includes your landing page. Keep your list of benefits and unique selling points the same throughout your online advertising and promotions.

18. Show a face – Studies have shown that using smiling faces (particularly the smiling face of a woman) increases trust. Show the face of you, you and your team, or a happy customer. You increase your trust – which means you increase conversions.

One of Wishpond’s landing page templates (which are easily customizable!) with images of smiling people.

landing page template
19. Speak to your customer – Use “you” in your landing page copy. Think of your landing page as a place where someone is visiting you in-person. Craft personal marketing copy that speaks the language of your intended market. If your demographic is the millennial generation, use language and images that relate. if you’re marketing to a geo-location target, use local references to instill trust that you’re a business that relates to them personally.

20. Use customer testimonials – Share good quotes from your customers – and show their face and name. People trust the opinions of people – especially those of friends. Social endorsements are a valuable way to gain and reinforce trust in future customers.

21. Determine the length of your forms – It’s a fine balance between asking too much information in your form fields, and increasing your conversion rate. The longer your form, generally speaking, the fewer people are going to make the time and effort to complete it. Keep your form fields to a minimum such as “first name” and “email” as mandatory contact information.  You can always have optional fields to gather richer customer data – without losing as many leads.

Improve Your Landing Page SEO


A landing page is part of online marketing. Online marketing does have a technical side.

Getting your landing page found is important too. You need to work on landing page optimization for SEO purposes.

Here’s 4 tips to increase your landing page SEO:

22. Use keywords in your page title – The URL path of your landing page should include your keywords. No, it’s actually not that hard to do. Just make sure your landing page has a title, and you use that title when you’re creating the page on your website. (If you’re not the one doing your website stuff – tell your request to your webmaster.)

23. Use keywords and keyword phrases in your text – Make it clear to search engines (like Google) what your page is about. Use your keyword phrases (like, what your offer is about) in the text of your page. Think of this as how to speak to Google, just like you speak to your customer to tell them what you’re about.

24. Include social share buttons – Google “likes” a highly shared page. Make your social share buttons easy to see on your page. Put them at the top of your page, and make them highly visible on your landing page.

Wishpond’s Guide to Landing Pages ebook page has social share buttons.

landing page template
25. Use relevant meta tags – If you’re not a technical type – don’t go all droopy eyes quite yet, you’ve almost made it through the SEO tips. Meta tags are your site’s backend stuff that Google reads. So, yeah, they’re very important. Use them for your Title, Keywords and Description attributes. Use Alt tags too, for image descriptions.

There are many more SEO tactics to use, but I’ll just stick with those…

20 Bonus Quick-Fire Landing Page Optimization Tips

26. Be value-oriented – Money talks – and that includes on your landing page, too. Including the distinct value of your offer (“Save $300!”) on your page can alert page visitors to the benefit within your page, increasing landing page optimization and better priming leads for future marketing efforts.

27. Add a countdown timer – As mentioned earlier in this article, creating urgency can be a huge boost to your conversion rates. Countdown timers are great. They’re simple to add with your landing page builder, and they’re visually engaging, as they click down in real-time as the visitor views your page.

landing page optimization

28. Use visual hierarchy – Visual hierarchy is a design theory that helps viewers determine what elements are important compared to others on a page. To employ it with landing page optimization in mind, make the important parts of your page stand out by making them bigger or brighter, or by adding a shadow to it to make it “pop” off of the page. I’d recommend doing this for things like your form or CTA.

29. Use directional cues – Directional cues are things that help to direct a viewer’s attention. Specifically, these refer to eyes in images, arrows, or even the way you organize elements. Use directional cues to draw focus towards important elements for landing page optimization, like your forms and CTAs.

landing page optimization

30. Add a secondary CTA – Sometimes, your page won’t be enough to convince people to convert, and that’s okay. For these people, however, you can include another CTA with a secondary offer. Maybe they just need more information, or they’d like to see some case studies or testimonials.

landing page optimization

31. Employ social proof – Employing social proof is a huge boost to your credibility, and an awesome way to increase trust and reduce hesitation in your landing page visitors. One method to leverage social proof for landing page optimization is to mention the number of customers you have (as you can see the in the example below).

landing page optimization

32. Add trust symbols – Trust symbols include things like logos of companies you’ve worked with, or security symbols (think security company logos on your checkout page). These, again, reduce hesitation. Adding elements that page visitors recognize and are familiar with helps your landing page optimization, easing them into converting.

landing page optimization

33. Use statistics – Pictures are worth a thousand words, and numbers can be too, if you use them correctly. Use statistics – proof from past success stories and things like that – to highlight the things that are potential with your product. For example, you might say “We’ve helped 100,000 clients increase their conversion rates by 30%”. It’s a short and effective method of landing page optimization.

34. Benefit/action-oriented headlines – This is a tip you’ll hear everywhere. Creating headlines that highlight the specific benefit that your page provides is the best way to use the copy in your hero section for landing page optimization. Think about what your viewer wants, and play upon that when you’re building your headline.

landing page optimization

35. Use power words – Another copy-related tip. Power words are like garnish for your copy. They give it the extra kick or oomph it needs to be great and really have an impact on your visitors, your landing page optimization and your conversion rate. Looking for a list? This one from SmartBlogger is a good place to start!

36. Match ad and landing page copy – Okay, one more copy tip. Chances are, if you’re looking to get the most out of your landing pages, you’re already running ads to it. Great! One thing I see many companies neglect is creating a seamless experience between their ads and landing pages, which is an important part of UX. A simple way to do this is to match the copy from your ad to the copy in the headline of your landing page.

landing page optimization

landing page optimization

37. Create an offer – Let’s be real here. Your landing page might follow every single landing page optimization best practice there is, but if the benefit it promises to visitors isn’t enough, you’re not going to get the conversions you want. If your initial benefit isn’t enough, consider adding an offer (like a free trial or sample) to sweeten the deal.

landing page optimization

38. A/B test your page – Testing is one of the most important parts of any landing page optimization optimization you’re doing, whether that’s on a single piece of copy on a small popup or an entire page. Make sure your landing page editor allows you to A/B test your page, so you can optimize each element and ensure you’re getting the conversion rate you’re looking for. I’d test big things first – forms, headlines, CTAs – and then move onto less impactful elements.

39. Create different pages for different segments – You know this best: your target market isn’t made up of people who are all the same. If you have several different (but distinct) segments within your target market, create different landing pages for them and run ads accordingly. This might influence the way you write your copy, the images you use, and more – and creating a personalized experience is the key to landing page optimization.

40. Add video – Though I can’t guarantee it will increase conversion rates, adding video to your landing page is definitely something to test when it comes to landing page optimization. This is an especially effective strategy when you’re looking at ways to better explain your product or service. A video, especially when it’s well-produced, can help you better connect with viewers and educate them on the benefits of your brand.

landing page optimization

41. Use exit popups – I know, I know, popups suck from a user experience point of view. But they’re also almost essential for landing page optimization, to maximize the number of leads you generate. Remember that someone who views an exit popup is pretty much a lost cause – it’s generally a person who’s about to click out of your page. Give them an increased offer (or communicate some additional benefit) to get them to think twice about converting.

42. Avoid negative suggestion – When you’re looking at the copy on your landing page, you might think about making statements like “you won’t get any spam”. Though at first glance this might seem like a good idea to reduce hesitation, this might actually put the idea in your visitors’ heads that they could get spammed – and they may not have been even thinking about it previously. This will end up lowering your conversion rates and dropping your landing page optimization – so be careful!

43. Use multiple CTAs – If you’ve got a particularly long page and only one CTA, chances are there’s going to be multiple times when a CTA won’t be visible on your page. You always want your visitors to be able to convert as quickly and easily as possible, so adding a CTA in each section within your page or a “hello bar” with a CTA can help greatly with landing page optimization.

44. Make your page skimmable – Not every reader is equal, and you want to design your page in a way that appeals to the different types of page viewers. A common trend in page visitors is skimming: the tendency to read only highlighted portions of the page. Use text styling (size and weight) to differentiate between the more and less important elements of your page, making it easy for skim-heavy readers to understand your page.

landing page optimization

45. Optimize for load time – This is definitely an underappreciated part of landing page optimization. One thing you should be looking to achieve on your page is a small load time. The biggest part of minimizing load time is reducing the size of the images on your page. While you can do this in Photoshop, another (easier) way to do it is using a service like TinyJPG.

46. Add interactive elements – Instead of adding a link, embed a video, add audio content, animations, and other interactive elements. This takes a static landing page and turns it into a more visually-charged, interactive one, to help you get more actions from your visitors.

According to a webinar we ran with Brenna O’Neill, interactive landing page expert from Genially: “This way the receiver really gets to choose the information that they want to consume” which results in more engagement and more conversions. 

Conclusion


Start with a few of these tips – or try them all – to increase your landing page optimization.

As with any online marketing, take the opportunity to test your campaigns. A/B test your landing pages, tweaking and optimizing to obtain a cumulative optimization gain – and get lots more leads and sales.

Read more landing pages conversion tips:

What do you think? Do you increase your qualified leads with landing pages? How do you optimize your website conversion pages?

P.S. Wishpond’s Facebook Contest Apps make it easy to create sweepstakes, photo contests, Instagram hashtag contests & more. Looking for inspiration? Check out 25 Creative Facebook Contest Ideas You Can Use Today.

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