How to Increase Your Landing Page Conversion Rate

Landing pages have a singular purpose: converting audiences to post-lead generation. As a fundamental component of many marketing endeavors, the effectiveness of landing pages has a tremendous impact on final revenue. As such, striving to increase your landing page conversion rate is always a worthy goal – but it does come with challenges.

Covering the Fundamentals

To explore this subject properly, let us first cover the fundamentals. We’ll briefly define what landing pages are, which content can serve their purpose, and why conversion rate improvements warrant attention. As we do, we’ll offer appropriate material on each that you may consult at your leisure.

What is a Landing Page?

A landing page, as the name suggests, is a page a person lands on when clicking your links. This may be the first touchpoint with your pages or website for many customer journeys. 

Therefore, what makes landing pages unique is their purpose. As pages are typically reserved for ad clicks, they intend to convert audiences by enticing them to complete the desired action. And this is what differentiates them from landing blogs which may serve as a first touchpoint but urge visitors to explore content.

Of course, “conversion” in itself may differ. Landing pages may not just sell a product or service but aim to convert through such actions as:

• Subscribing to a newsletter
• Completing a form
• Downloading media

Can Other Content Serve as a Landing Page?

That said, landing pages are not the only type of content that can serve this purpose. Landing blogs, for instance, may hint at turning blog posts into landing pages being a viable practice. To take advantage of your blogs this way, you must align them with typical landing page philosophies. That is, reroute them into purpose-focused pages with the following:

• A clear, visible Call To Action (CTA) offering demonstrable value
• Proper layout with ample white space and minimal visual clutter to distract visitors from said CTA
• Goal-relevant special offers, such as discounts or free tools

What Is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) – And Is It The Only Way To Go?

CRO is not the only way to help your business thrive. In other words, Conversion Rate Optimization is not the only course of action available to actually increase conversions.

As the name suggests, CRO is a series of practices that optimizes landing pages for conversions. The methods we’ll discuss next firmly belong to CRO, for that matter. As we’ll see, CRO includes page simplification, CTA visibility, and other factors that best frame the customer journey.

However, conversion is only one step of the customer journey. Enhancing lead generation rates, for instance, will drive more sales and lead acquisition optimizations. Conversions drive sales, but a landing page’s effectiveness will also depend on lead nurturing. Thus, while we can’t explore these here for text economy, it’s always vital to contextualize conversions this way.

5 Ways to Increase Your Landing Page Conversion Rate

With the fundamentals in order, we may now explore five essential CRO practices. Without further ado, let’s begin.

Before You Start: Employ Insights Tools to Identify Problems

First and foremost, before beginning to apply any changes, you must be able to identify the actual problems at hand. There is an array of factors that impact your conversion rate, such as:

• Web design and website performance
• Landing page copy and layout
• CTA copy, placement, and clarity

Therefore, blindly changing any landing page element will most likely fail. Instead, you can use insights tools like Google Analytics, website heat maps, and others to identify problematic areas. You may find that, for example:

• Not enough visitors scroll all the way down, implying copy underperformance
• Many visitors click on unclickable elements that look clickable, causing confusion
• Many visitors hover their mouse cursors over secondary visual elements, implying distractions from your CTAs

Each of these problems will require entirely different solutions, understandably. Therefore, you should first make sure you fully understand what optimizations your landing pages need. 

#1 De-clutter Your Page and Keep Your Loading Speeds Fast

Page simplicity and performance are two significant elements to start with if you want to optimize across the board. De-cluttering any landing page should appease most visitors and keep its loading speed as fast as possible. Fortunately, the two overlap somewhat.

Regarding fast loading speeds, they may not directly increase your landing page conversion rate. However, they will ensure fewer visitors bounce before converting, as Google/SOASTA research finds. This will also produce better user engagement signals should Search Engine Optimization (SEO) be on your marketing list.

One of the best ways to do so is by de-cluttering your landing pages and removing unnecessary visuals. This can include images, other media, and heavy themes and plugins. Consult your analytics and determine which visuals prove distracting, serve no purpose, or drag your speeds down, and cull them.

#2 Perfect Your Page Layout

As you examine your pages’ visuals, you may also investigate their overall layout. This fundamental element will dictate how well your pages can maintain your visitors’ attention, how easily digestible their information will be, and so on.

As we’ve written in the past, there are many landing page mistakes to avoid in this regard. Most notably, with your analytics in hand, you may consider the following:

• Secondary visual elements; do they add to the experience or distract from your CTA?
• White space; does your copy have room to breathe and stand out?
• Information hierarchy; does your copy flow naturally, following a logical hierarchy and your visitors’ reading patterns?

Unsurprisingly, even minor layout tweaks can help increase your landing page conversion rate. A highly readable page that’s comfortable to the eye is much more welcoming than a poorly structured one, after all.

#3 Offer Immediate Value Above The Fold

Next, beyond your page layout, remember an SEO mantra; “content is king”. In this context, value is king – and your pages need to offer it quickly. If landing pages are, in essence, a two-way transaction, your visitors need to immediately know the value they get.

This is not to be mistaken for placing your CTA above the fold, even though that’s also an established practice. Instead, it’s about ensuring your visitor that your CTA is worth clicking on.

For example, Velaro’s landing page features a form just below the fold and a CTA at the very bottom. However, it offers immediate value:

• The header acts as a “grabber”, citing an interesting statistic
• Copy immediately takes over, outlining the importance of leveraging this statistic
• The CTA follows at the end, alongside a discreet second CTA for a newsletter subscription

This is a fine example of offering value, irrespective of CTA placement. And it’s the combination of layout and copy can enhance your conversion rates and boost your revenue. 

#4 Minimize CTAs on Each Page

On the subject of multiple CTAs, you’ve probably heard of the rule of thumb; “one landing page, one CTA”. Yet that example is not always followed. That’s because the rule of thumb is little more than that; general guidance.

Indeed, if you want to increase your landing page conversion rate, you should minimize your CTAs per page. CXL research confirms this, dubbing the phenomenon “analysis paralysis”. “More choices can often lead to a worse user experience”, they note and cite an example of a WhirlPool email. In that example, simple page de-clutter and a single-CTA approach yielded a 42% increase in clicks.

However, having one CTA per page is not absolute. In both examples above, all CTAs lead to desirable, relevant outcomes – and audience insights support them.

In brief, this practice caters to the fundamentals of a landing page’s purpose. Give your visitors just enough options to ensure they progress on their journey in a desirable, goal-relevant way. Yes, a single CTA may often be the safer option – but CTA minimization is the principle here.

#5 Optimize Your CTAs

Finally, with CTA placement and volume in order, CTA optimizations still abound. CRO heavily emphasizes CTAs because they’re the proverbial heart of landing pages and the literal call to action. Optimizing them may be the best way to increase your landing page conversion rate. This is a vast subject, as you’ve likely seen if you consulted our articles above. If you haven’t, our dedicated article on creating a high-converting landing page may warrant a read after this one.

Still, here we can cover the most crucial aspects and let your insights guide you further.

• Immediate visibility; make your CTA immediately visible and clear. This includes making it appear clickable through its color, shape, and copy and isolating it from other seemingly clickable elements.
• Readability and relevance; have your CTA be highly readable, choosing a clean font and minding color contrasts. As you do, make sure its copy is relevant to the rest of your page.
• Copy clarity and value; keep your CTA copy clear and hyper-focused on value. Traditional “Buy now” or “get your FREE booklet” lets your visitors know what will happen once they click and why they should do so.

As with all of the above, your insights will also be fundamental here. Apply small changes, and A/B test them thoroughly to identify what works best for your audiences before committing to changes.

In Closing

In closing, there are several ways to increase your landing page conversion rate. Despite their variety, they all largely follow the same principles; focusing your pages on their singular purpose, making them digestible and visually appealing, and enticing visitors to click your CTAs through valuable offerings.

While brief, we hope this article helped inform your efforts. For a deeper dive into Conversion Rate Optimization, feel free to contact us and request a free strategy call. We’ll be more than happy to help you determine if CRO is the right choice for your business and how to best approach it.