Tony Fazzini - October 28, 2013
A common practice for businesses that are utilizing paid search is to create landing pages specific for the content they are trying to engage searchers for. This is beneficial because it allows a business to focus on conversions instead of just having an information page.
Here are 3 common mistakes that businesses make when creating landing pages:
- Hidden or unclear call to action: When creating a landing page, it is very important for the searcher to understand why you would want them to click on the ad to land on your page. Once on that page, the action mentioned within the ad copy should be a prominent focus of that page in order to entice the searcher to continue through the funnel and convert. If the user is confused on the next step, they will typically leave the page immediately and select another result from the search engine results page.
- Most important information below the fold: When someone is searching the web for something specific, they have a very small attention span. If they do land on your website, they will typically make a decision to stay or leave within 3 seconds. Knowing this, it is crucial to put your best foot forward and have the most compelling information on the top of the page. If the searcher must scroll in order to get to the heart of what the page is about, you will lose them more often than not.
- Form/Conversion process too long: This step is probably the most common issue of them all. For ecommerce businesses, you want to make sure you don’t have a long tedious shopping process in order to check out with a product. If the user feels that steps are unnecessary, they are likely to move on to another site that is less arduous. For lead generation websites, the conversion process needs to be clear and easy to navigate through. You want to get enough information to understand what a searcher is interested in so someone from your team can follow up with the appropriate response.
The three mistakes mentioned above are just a few of many common errors. When creating a landing page, a great idea would be to show the page to someone unfamiliar with the website (or business) and see if they are able to navigate and understand what the page content is about. As they work with the website, see if they are able to identify what next steps they should take. This is helpful to see how others will view your site and give you a good indication prior to launch. Once you’ve launched a new landing page, it’s important to track the results of the page and test different variations in order to improve conversion rates.
By implementing these steps, you should be able to run a much more successful paid search campaign using landing pages.
