Landing Pages And ROI – Penny Pinching In Hard Times

‘You can’t improve on perfection’, goes one old saw, but closer to the truth is ‘There is always room for improvement!’ This is particularly true in the case of landing pages. If you have never seriously taken a good hard look at your landing page, you could be ignoring an optimization tactic that is almost guaranteed to improve your site.

Nearly any improvement at all on a landing page will lead to increases in traffic and conversions. There are several reasons for this. One, Google takes your landing into account when calculating the value of your site. Load time Is particularly important, as a slow load will count against you in the long run – Google wants its users to get answers NOW not thirty seconds from now when all your cool graphics finish loading.

Landing page testing is simple to do with all the tools available; with the tracking capability you have through Google Webmaster Tools, you can actually monitor every page on your site to see how many people click through to it, what they look at and if any conversions run through that page or not.

After optimizing your landing page to attract the best traffic possible, you can move on to testing other pages on your site. The goal is to get the most conversions possible and that means squeezing every page until it squeals. Since your landing pages are what most consumers will see when they enter your site (excluding visitors via deep links) it is a top priority to make sure they make the right impression – if you can hook their attention for 5-10 seconds they have passed the critical time span and have a better chance of sticking around and possibly converting.

A bounce back rate of over 50% is not uncommon in landing pages – this occurs when the consumer hit’s the back button to back out of your site. Working on your landing pages and testing multiple variants ensures that you drive as many people as possible deeper into your sites where they will encounter key conversion points and calls to action.

Google’s Leung constantly reminds us that landing pages can be the one thing that makes or breaks a site – and with such a simple path to increased ROI, why would anyone ignore such a simple key to heightened conversion rates? The economy isn’t getting any better, and every penny helps.