Improve Your Landing Page: 3 Tips to Increase Conversions

I just finished a conversation with a potential new client today and we were reviewing their not-so-successful landing pages. As I was making my recommendations and educating him a bit on how a landing page is supposed to work, I figured the information would make a great blog post too.

Here are three tips to improve your landing pages:

1. Focus on a Single Conversion Type

Before you even start to write, design, and layout your landing page, you need to decide what tool you are going to use to convert prospects into customers, or get your visitors to join your list and what action is going to be required of the user.

Are they going to need to enter their email address and click submit? Do they need to call you? Do they need to comment on your blog? Do they need to email you? Should they click a link to purchase something?

Knowing the actions your visitor needs to take and the tool you are going to use to help facilitate and encourage that action is the first step to designing a better landing page.

2. Eliminate All User Distractions

You probably put forth quite a bit of effort to get your visitor to your landing page. The worst thing that could happen is to have them leave without joining your list, subscribing to your blog, or purchasing an item, etc.

Distractions that pull the visitor’s attention away from the focus of the page, and action, will cause your conversions to plummet. When designing your landing page, you want to remove all unnecessary elements, links and navigation that don’t have anything to do with the focus of the landing page and don’t help guide the visitor to take the desired action.

3. Keep Important Information “Above The Fold”

“Above the fold” is a term from newspaper publishing that references the space above the fold line that the readers see when the paper is folded and sitting on the newsstands. You may not realize it but websites have a virtual fold line. The virtual fold is the bottom of your screen, which makes the space “above the fold” the area of your website that the visitor sees before scrolling down.

Your landing page should have all of the important information your visitor needs to decide whether or not they want to continue reading or exploring your content “above the fold.” You should never force a visitor to scroll down and search for the content they need or the reason the page exists.

Anything to add? Anything I missed?