Greg Krehbiel on Publishing and Online Marketing

These are my notes for a SIPA Roundtable discussion on landing page optimization.

The visitor to your landing page is asking these questions:

• Am I in the right place?
• Can I trust this site / company?
• What do I do next?

Am I in the right place?

Consider how the visitor arrived at your site and make the transition from the previous page as smooth as possible.

The visitor has a goal in mind and wants to know if this page is relevant to completing that goal.

Can I trust this site / company?

Any kid and his mutt dog can make a web page, and web visitors know that. You have to win credibility with your visitors with …

• A professional design
• A guarantee
• A good brand name
• Transparency (“About Us” and “Contact Us” links)

What do I do next?

Your page should be goal-oriented. Goals might include …

• Browse news articles
• Sign up for an e-mail alert
• Buy a product
• Watch a video
• Get more information

Whatever goal your page is directed towards, make it plain to the user how to achieve that goal and avoid unnecessary distractions.

However – don’t try to herd your visitors, and do provide links back to your homepage. (It helps with your page rank on Google.)

To optimize conversion rates, focus on usability

Keep it simple

• Make links speak for themselves
• Make the structure of your website predictable
• Provide clear feedback to user actions
• Make it hard to commit a serious mistake

These are just guidelines … and I’m not sure they’re all true!

Think of these concepts as you come up with ideas for your landing pages, but always test them.

For Discussion

• Reaction to these guidelines?
• What’s worked for you?
• What difficulties have you faced?
• Have you tried …
  • Cool effects (Ajax, jQuery, etc.)
  • Video
  • User ratings, testimonials
  • Other?
• Do you test your landing pages?
• What do you use?
• Any problems?
• Any successes?

Resources

Let’s Talk Landing Pages

Optimizing Conversion Rates: It’s All About Usability

Creating effective landing pages – optimization tips

Greg Krehbiel Landing pages

10 Landing Page Optimization Tactics gives this advice.

In today’s “give-it-to-me-quick-or-I’m-out-of-here” world, you need to keep your landing page very focused and pretty simple.

Why do people have such a quick draw on relevance?

Perhaps it’s because the barrier to entry for new products, new services, new advertising, … let’s face it, new annoyances … has become so small that any clown with a computer can get his voice on the street.

If you were going to pay $100,000 on an ad campaign, you’d going to take some time and do it right. But if you can whip something up in five minutes and start driving paid search traffic in another 30, you might not be so concerned about quality.

The web is full of cheap garbage and shoddy pages because it’s so easy to do.

Your visitor is looking for something. To find it he has to wade through 100 pages and decide if you’re one of the 99 bozos or the 1 keeper. He doesn’t have a lot of time to fool around.

You have to build trust by making it clear that

• your page is relevant to his search,
• you’re a trusted and trustworthy merchant, and
• it’s easy for him to do what he wants to do … get information, buy a product, whatever.

I don’t believe the problem is short attention spans. Once you build trust and convince the user he’s in the right place, he’s willing to hear you out.

Greg Krehbiel Landing pages