Less experienced digital marketers often put too much weight into vanity metrics such as the total number of website visitors, the design of a website compared to competitors, number of Facebook likes, etc. While these metrics can sometimes give an indication of the level of growth in the company, there are far more important and accurate statistics to consider. Your website bounce rate is one of the most important metrics you should be paying attention to since a high bounce rate suggests that people are not finding what they’re looking for.
Optimize for ALL Devices
Perhaps the most common reason people tend to leave a website is because it’s not displaying properly on their device. In the last couple of years this there’s been a decrease in desktop users while mobile users have increased exponentially. See our previous blog, “Ready, Set, Is Your Website Mobile Friendly?” Your landing page should be designed to display and perform on screens of any size. All websites we develop now are responsive to ensure an ideal user experience on any device.
Improve your Content
Just as important is the quality of your content. After all, if the content is not relevant to what your visitor is seeking, then they’re not likely to hang around for long. No one wants to scroll through a long-winded sales page full of copy laden with jargon and confusing specifications. Instead, start with an eye-catching title and subheading followed by a short bulleted list of the key selling points about your product or service. By all means provide further information further down the page, preferably along with social proof in the form of reviews and testimonials to back up your claims.
Get Rid of Clutter
Many times the importance of reducing clutter on a landing page is overlooked. Instead of adding more information, navigational elements, graphics, and other content remember the K.I.S.S. method. Simple should be the standard when it comes to sales content. Keep copy short and concise. Paragraphs should be no more than few lines long, with short sentences and minimal use of jargon. Focus on key selling points and lead the user to a conversion – a request a quote, add to cart, fill out a form to receive more information!
Don’t Mislead Visitors
At a time when personal recommendations, online reviews and other forms of social proof rule in the digital marketing world, deliberately misleading your visitors is one of the quickest ways to destroy your online reputation. Your content must absolutely live up to your visitor’s expectations. It needs to be relevant to what they are searching. The only marketers who don’t care about content relevancy are spammers. Don’t try to capitalize on supposedly high-value, high traffic keywords that are not related to your product or service. It will do nothing but increase your bounce rate which can be looked upon by a search engine as a spam indicator.
Minimize On-page Distractions
A landing page exists for one purpose and one purpose only and that’s to generate sales or leads. Anything that distracts your visitors from fulfilling that goal will only be detrimental to your landing pages performance. If your landing page (or any other area of your website for that matter) bombards visitors with distractions they’ll likely leave frustrated. Keep your color palette consistent and conservative, and avoid going over the top with fonts and graphics that might sidetrack people. The only major navigational element you really need on the landing page is the call to action itself.
Just remember, a good landing page should ideally have a bounce rate in the region of 40-50%. Any lower than this you should be giving yourself a huge pat on the back. But having a bounce rate of even 50% is still perfectly respectable and will send positive signals to the search engines too.
