A few months ago we wrote a post about whether or not to trap a visitor on a landing page.  This continues to be a dilemma for many of our clients.  However (I’m not afraid to admit it) I’m pretty sure I missed the boat on the most optimal approach for landing pages.  Thank you to Yahoo’s recent designs for the enlightenment!

With landing pages, we typically weigh the pros and cons of having a landing page that prohibits navigation, so we keep the visitor focused on conversion.  Or, having a landing page that is part of the regular website with all the links active, allowing the visitor to wander to gather the information they need in hopes they will get to a conversion point before exiting the site.  The biggest challenge with the trapping technique is that these pages often lack in data to keep visitors around.  While they may have improved conversion rates, their associated bounce rates are also much higher.

Yahoo’s recent designs seem to have the best approach here.  The goal is simple.  To make sure the visitor doesn’t need to search beyond the page by providing them with an engaging, multi-media experience where they can browse to find everything they need on that single page.

Yahoo is saying that user engagement on their pages is nearly twice the amount with their latest designs.  And since dwell time directly correlates to conversion rates, let’s see what we can glean from Yahoo’s designs that can be directly incorporated into landing pages.

One prominent concept is search by clicking.  For many, over half of the visitors who come to their site are using the search function to try to find out what they need.   But why not change the game by providing users with lots of different types of browse options and suggest related search terms for them to use for browsing.  This can prevent them from ending up on a search results page that is less than satisfactory to their information needs.

Utilize multiple media formats.  In order to provide an engaging experience and meet the needs of a variety of visitors, employ multiple media types on your landing pages – text, images, videos, slide shows, interactive widgets, news and social streams come to mind.   Multiple formats make your page more engaging and help meet the demand of all different types of learning preferences.

Make it Current.  Highlight for the visitor what’s trending now.  Try related news streams, blog posts, and social feeds and call out trending related search topics on your landing pages.  Become the source for all the latest and greatest information that visitors will come to.

Make it locally relevant.  This can be particularly helpful for national or global advertisers.  Are there dynamic snippets of locally relevant, related information that you can include?

Make it Infinite.  Incorporate infinite browse boxes onto your website.  For your products or services you can include infinite browse boxes for images, videos, news streams, whitepapers, blog posts, forum posts, slide shows, ebooks, awards, comparisons, analyst studies, upcoming events, you name it! The possibilities are endless.

The bottom line is to think about all the data points of research a potential customer needs to do before converting, and presenting that data on a single browsable page in a multimedia format.

Take a peek at your landing pages and start to brainstorm how you can start to keep an keep an ongoing dialogue with your visitors on the single page.

Spring is here, and the pools are open. Time for some bikini boot camp for your landing pages to make sure they’re in tip-top shape as your business dives into summer.

Here are some questions to ask to find the trouble zones you’ll need to focus on in order to get lean, mean performance from your landing pages.

• Do you go below the fold? Try to keep your content concise so that your page fits above the fold and doesn’t require scrolling. If it’s just not possible, make sure that your best assets appear first including what you do, your unique value and a call to action.

• Do you have meaningless words? There have been polls and studies done about the most abused gobbledygook words and phrases. These are the filler that you use to describe your solution that are completely meaningless to your visitors, which include “innovative,” “next-generation,” “cutting-edge,” “marketing-leading,” “easy-to-use”, etc. (I’m sure you’ve heard from blowhards around the pool who use language like this.)  It’s time to shed the meaningless words and just stick with meaningful communication. Fluff is yesterday – clear articulation is today. Don’t use a single word that has an express marketing intent. Cross them all out and just say what you do and why you are the best, using only your customers words (i.e., “this widget cut my operating costs by 10 percent!”)

• Do you have too much information? Landing pages are not the place to ramble on about every little detail about your company and products.  It’s important to stick to just enough information to help users understand in a matter of seconds that (1) they are in the right place; (2) you are better than everyone else; and (3) what the next step to take is.  Save detailed comparisons, extensive product information and anything that would require several minutes of reading for other places on your website.

• Do you expect too much time? How much time does it take someone completely unfamiliar with what you do to read your page and digest what you are trying to tell them and take the next step action? Get some friends to help you out with this exercise. If this is more than 1.5 minutes, you’ll need to do some streamlining in order to have the digestion process occur more quickly.

Now that we’ve given you some ideas about how to cut the fat, let’s talk about the key assets that you want to have shine on your new and improved page:

1. Headline: What do you do – in your customers own words.
2. Benefits: What makes you the best – again, in your customers own words; keep the list short – just three-to-five will do.
3. Call to Action / Offer: What should your visitor do next? Make this accessible right on your landing page to take the mystery out of how much effort is required to take it to the next step.
4. Testimonials / Awards: Give yourself some credibility – just some teasers here will do.

It’s also important to use some lower calorie ways of communicating so that you can maintain your lean, mean page and not just gain the weight back again over time:

1. Images: Use pictures to portray whatever you can – they are interesting to view and can convey at least 1000 words. A picture can help a visitor confirm they are in the right place and understand what you do in the matter of an instant.
2. Videos: If you offer something complex or a concept that is not widely understood, a video can be a great way to provide more detailed information rather than lengthy bouts of text.
3. Bold, Bullets, Formatting: Make sure it’s easy to “cruise through” your page and digest the information as quickly as possible.

Using these simple and easy tips to get your key landing pages into shape will ensure you’re not only attracting great traffic, but turning that traffic into real business (but don’t apply the bikini analogy here… because that’s just creepy.)

We frequently get inquiries from businesses that were getting a healthy amount of leads and conversions, but then suddenly their conversion rate takes a nose dive. When the phone stops ringing in today’s economy, panic ensues.

Many businesses aren’t even aware of all the different factors which can cause a negative change like this to occur. In order to give you a hand, we put together this list of questions to ask yourself to get to the root of the problem.

We’ll start at the “front” of the line with our problem-solving and work our way back to the landing page and website, since front-line changes are much easier to address.

1. Have the paid search keywords that are getting clicks changed?

Check out your pay per click (PPC) advertising keywords bringing in traffic. Compare the keywords from the time period in which your conversion rate was good to the time period for which you have not been getting conversions. Are the keywords different?

For PPC, this is an easy problem to solve – pause the keywords which have been taking up budget but not bringing in leads. Then make sure the keywords that used to work have bids that will enable them to get the most traffic.

2. Have the natural search keywords that are bringing traffic to your site changed?

Comb through your analytics to get the list of natural search queries that were bringing people to your site in the good times. Are they still bringing you natural search traffic? Has your natural search rank for these keywords fallen over time?

If these keywords aren’t still working for you on the natural search front, get busy with some SEO activities. Conduct some on-page and link building around those keywords that used to bring in the converting traffic.

3. Are you receiving 100 percent of available ad impressions on Google AdWords?

If you’ve lowered your budget, raised your bids or have been busy adding keywords to your campaign, you may not be receiving 100 percent of your available ad impressions.

Look at your campaign inside of AdWords and if it says “Limited by Budget” in the campaign status column, you are not currently receiving 100 percent of available ad impressions.

Review your keyword list to make sure that the keywords that were bringing you conversions previously are getting 100 percent of available ad impressions. To ensure this you might need to pause keywords that have not been performing and lower bids for keywords that are not the true work horses. If you have a large volume of keywords, but only a tiny budget you may need to do a lot of trimming here to ensure the performing keywords get their full exposure.

4. Has your ad position changed?

Different ad positions perform differently. Which ad position is best? Well, that depends on many factors. But, if you were getting conversions, you can start to hone in on the ad positions that were working for you. Go back to the time during which those conversions were coming in and review the ad positions for those top-performing keywords. Compare this against the positions you are currently attaining. Have things changed? If so, modify your bids (this may mean switching from automated bidding to manual bidding) so that your ads for these keywords start to appear in positions that bring you results.

5. Has your offer changed?

Did you have an offer in your ad copy or landing page that changed? Has pricing increased or has an incentive expired? Go back to when those conversions were coming in and review the offers in your ad copy and on your landing page. If previous pricing or an expired offer was bringing you results, consider re-enabling that offer.

6. Is it the season?

Many businesses go through seasonal changes, but when the slow season comes around, they often forget that it happens every year. Go back through your analytics and your lead tracking and check to see if this same thing happens every year around the same time. If so, think about ways to motivate leads during the slow times – you might need to whip up some special attractive offers to help increase your conversion volume during these times.

7. Has your competition changed?

Check out your natural search and paid search competition for those top-performing keywords which were bringing in conversions. See any new faces on the block? Get to know the new faces and make sure you are highlighting your unique capabilities and offers as compared to them.

8. Has your competition changed their offer?

Look at the ad copy, landing page and website offers for your natural search and paid search competitors? Where do you stand? Are they offering more? Have they lowered their prices? Have they won awards? Have they added guarantees?

Review their offers and see what you have to offer that makes your business unique and a competitive winner.

9. Has your competition upgraded their landing pages?

This always seems to hit in waves. While reviewing your competition, check out their paid search landing pages and websites. Have some of them gone through website re-designs recently and raised the bar? Have they added new features to their sites such as reviews, testimonials, blogs, forums, photos, or social feeds?

If their websites are looking more professional, understandable, engaging, convincing or iterative than yours, it’s likely influencing your visitor’s impression of your company. Consider updating your website so you don’t lose out on sales due to this initial impression.

10. Has there been a lack of reviews or negative reviews on your business?

What have customers been saying about you online lately? Check out Google Local, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Yelp, City Search and any other applicable sites, which let people review your business online. Are there negative reviews that have come up recently? If so, reach out and take some steps to address them. Let people know that you care and inform them of the actions you are taking to improve.

Or, perhaps you don’t have any reviews but your competition does. In the online world of selecting services, reviews hold a lot of weight. If you don’t have many (or any) reviews, but your competitors do, many people will favor the business with positive reviews. Think about offering incentives to previous happy customers to get them to vocalize their great experiences on these review sites.

11. Has your landing page changed?

Have you changed your landing page content or layout? Have you increased the data, decreased the data, modified colors, moved your call to action, or changed your call to action text? All these things have an impact on user behavior. Try some a/b testing with the two landing pages (the old one and the new one) so you can see which one of them truly performs better. Sometimes the changes we make to our pages feel like an upgrade to us, but aren’t perceived that way by visitors.

12. Has your website changed?

Similar to #11 above – if you’ve been making some changes take a hard look at the things you’ve modified since your conversion rate plummeted. Think about the things that might be having the most impact on your visitor behavior and slowly try out some of the older concepts in your new site to see what content or layouts have the greatest impact on your conversion rate.

Obviously, you should use appropriate data from your Yield Web Marketing Suite reports to make these assessments to the extent possible. And be sure to the landing page optimization module to ensure only the best performing versions of these important pages are available to your customers.

A word of caution: don’t make too many changes at once. Go through this list in order and stop at the first item that is applicable to your situation and adjust it – then wait to see what happens. You may only need to make adjustments in one area, or you may need to make adjustments in several areas, but it’s important not to make too many changes at once so you can get to the root cause.

Okay, so we’ve talked about developing a landing page that keeps people on the page (versus letting them wander around your Website) and writing punchy headlines that draw people in to your page.

Now we’ll talk about calls-to-action.

When people think of a call-to-action, they hear a big beefy loud-mouth infomercial guy pitching cleaning products to consumers:

AND WHEN YOU ORDER THE PRODUCT RIGHT NOW, WE’LL SEND YOU NOT ONE, BUT TWO PRODUCTS – ALL FOR $24.95 PLUS SHIPPING AND HANDLING.

THAT’S TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE WHEN YOU PLACE YOUR ORDER RIGHT NOW THROUGH THIS SPECIAL TV OFFER!

In fact, I hear from companies that have actually removed calls-to-action from marketing collateral and Web pages because it’s “too salesy.”

In truth, a call-to-action is simply verbiage that tells people what to do next:
•    Sign up for a trial offer or demo
•    Place an order
•    Call a toll-free number
•    Download a white paper or guide
•    Subscribe to an e-newsletter
•    Register for a Webinar

Don’t confuse a call-to-action with a premium or offer. A call to action tells the prospect what to do next. A premium is a bonus, offer, or gift that gives the prospect even more reason to take the desired action.

Because they increase conversions, premiums and calls-to-action are often joined at the hip, like this:

Sign up today for a 30-day no-risk free trial of Yield’s Web Marketing Suite!

In order to get people to take a desired action, the call-to-action must state exactly what you want people to do, it must not include other types of actions, and it must be clearly visible on the page.

In addition, if your call to action includes a registration or purchase form, you should ensure the form is easy to complete in order to reduce abandoned forms. (Test your forms at home and via the various browsers – Mozilla’s Firefox, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google’s Chrome, and Apple’s Safari – to ensure all users can complete the form without a hitch.)

As with all aspects of the landing page, you can definitely test calls-to-action. Elements to test include:

Placement on the page – If you have a long-copy sales page, test the placement of the “submit order” or “purchase now” button to see which pulls the best response. Try placing it mid-page, multiple times on the page, within an “info” box at the bottom of the page, and as a simple text link.

Color – If you have a “register now” box or “purchase now” button, test colors to see which one works best.

Copy – Does a question such as, “Are you ready to see increased response on your landing pages?” draw more response than a statement such as, “Let Yield Software show you how to increase landing page conversions”? Test both.

Offer – Adding an offer to your call-to-action may increase conversions, but it pays to test various offers to learn which one your prospects and customers prefer.

Links – Which words in the call-to-action should you hyperlink?  The actual desired action such as “register now,” “sign up today,” or “download your free [item]” or is it better to link the name of the white paper, Webinar, product, or demo? Test and find out!

So here’s our pitch and call to action: Don’t forget that Yield’s Web Marketing Suite makes it very easy to test these and other elements – in real time – while our system automatically delivers the best performing page to your visitors over time.

To learn more, try our FREE no-risk 30-day trial of our Standard Package that supports up to $2,500 in ad spend, 1,000 keywords, and five landing pages.

This is a $129 value that comes with no obligation – meaning, try it for 30 days for free and if you don’t like it, walk away. Register for your free 30-day trial today! (Now how’s that for a good call-to-action?)

In my last blog post, I covered how to develop a landing page that increases conversions by limiting people’s options to explore other areas of your Website.  As I discussed in the post, you have many elements on the landing page that can make or break conversion rates, and one of those elements is the headline.

In his book, Tested Advertising Methods, John Caples explains why headlines are so important:

“In most advertisements, no matter how striking the illustration, the headlines are critically important. The majority of the public reads little else when deciding whether or not they are interested.”

The same holds true for landing pages – which are basically direct response ads designed to get people to take some sort of action.

So how do you add some muscle to your flabby headlines? Whole books have been written on this topic – so there’s no way I can cover everything. What follows are five basic strategies for more muscular headlines any company can quickly implement:

First: Spend more time writing them. Tom Ahern, expert fundraising consultant, speaker and author, says people will spend hours writing copy and only two minutes writing the headline – if that.  Usually written at the last minute, headlines, he says, are given very little thought – and it shows in the weak anemic headlines that populate fundraising materials. His advice? Spend more time on the headline and less time on the body copy.

Second: Write multiple headlines. Instead of writing one headline, brainstorm multiple headlines. The more you write, the more ideas you’ll come up with – and the punchier your headlines will become. If you have only one offer, consider writing multiple headlines that “pitch” the offer in different ways. For example, if you have a white paper offer, write headlines that present the offer as a “white paper,” “guide,” or “e-book,” and test to see which draws the best response.

Once you decide on a headline, don’t throw your discarded headlines away. You can use these to test against your main headline. Who knows – one of your “trashed” ideas could draw stellar response rates!

Third: Get input from others. Don’t rely on your own imagination only for a great headline. Solicit the opinions of others. One small change can turn a good headline into a response-busting headline.

Fourth: Include a time-based call-to-action. “Conference Registration Now Open” is a so-so headline. “Early Bird Special: $200 off Registration!” is better. Changing it to “Save $200 When You Register by June 15!” gives people an incentive to take action now.

Another incentive is the word “free,” which has been proven time and again to increase response rates. So use it if you have a free offer – i.e.: “Free Webinar,” “Free White Paper,” “Free Demo.”

Finally: Test your headlines. Components to test include color, size, and copy.

Test colors – What happens when you put the word “FREE” in red? How about the entire headline in red? Or blue?

Test font size – Increase the font size so that you have only one or two words per line. Does this increase response or lower it?

Test copy – And of course, test different headlines to determine which one delivers the best response.

In the old days, you used to have to test these things manually. Now with our Yield Web Marketing Suite, which includes a Landing Page Optimization Module, you can quickly test headlines, including color, size and copy – and see results in real time. (The module includes an easy-to-use wizard that guides you through the creation of multiple versions of your standard landing page.)  Our multivariate testing engine automatically serves up the best performing page to your visitors over time – improving your conversion rates while saving you considerable time and money.

If you’re testing headlines, let us know how you do. We’d love to feature your success story. You can send me an email at press[at]yieldsoftware[dot]com.

Transactional landing pages have one purpose only: to get people to take one specific action, whether it’s filling out a form for a white paper, purchasing a product, or even subscribing to an e-newsletter.

Yet many companies lower landing page conversion rates by providing opportunities to browse for related goods and services or offering all kinds of back-up information to support their offer.

In other words, if you’re trying to get people to sign up for your Webinar and on your landing page you have links to your Website, YouTube video, and white papers, you’re encouraging people to click away from your landing page – perhaps never to return.

I call this “Distraction Interaction.” Think about what happens when you go online to do something:

Initially… you open your email client to send someone an important email, but first you read your new messages and find an interesting newsletter, which you click open to read.

Then… within the newsletter are a few links to blogs and articles, which you read. An industry guru wrote one of the blog posts and you see her Twitter handle, so you open TweetDeck in order to follow her and then get sucked into Twitter . . . .

An hour later… you come up for air, completely forgetting you were supposed to send your customer that important email.

This exact process is what happens when you include links to additional information on your landing page!

To significantly decrease Distraction Interaction and increase conversions for various types of landing pages, consider the following tips:

Eliminate ALL links to your Website, blog, etc. – Eliminating links discourages people from clicking off your landing page and falling into a rabbit hole on your Website. If you want people to visit your site, give them a link on the “thank you” page once the transaction is complete.

Keep forms simple – A MarketingSherpa report on white papers revealed that people do not want to fill out long, complicated forms. On another note, have people outside your company test your forms before they’re live; you want to ensure they work smoothly and that your spam filter isn’t gobbling up the response emails.

Focus on one objective – The objective of the landing page is to get people to do one thing. Whatever your objective, ensure all landing page components support that objective, from the headline and body copy to the design and graphics.

Don’t “bait and switch” – If you’re using PPC, SEO, or other “inbound” methods to get people to the landing page, make sure the headline and the offer match what people are expecting to get. Nothing is worse than getting to a landing page that’s offering something completely different then what the ad copy proclaimed.

Include a “hero shot” – If you’re offering a product, white paper or other tangible item, include a graphic of the cover, a headshot of the Webinar presenter, or a photo of the item.

Once you have these elements in place, you can then begin testing headlines, images, form and copy to see what increases or decreases conversions, some of which we’ll cover in subsequent posts to this one.  And remember that our Yield Web Marketing Suite includes a landing page optimization module that enables real-time multivariate tests of landing pages. Our wizard takes you step-by-step through a process of creating test pages from your original; serves different versions as people click on links to your landing page; and automatically begins to favors the page that converts best overtime, improving your conversion rates in real time.

Do you have other suggestions for improving landing page conversions? Send us a tweet via Twitter at @YieldSW.

From ‘Private Beta’ to Available Now!

As of this moment, we’ve officially launched the new Yield Web Marketing Suite, a simplified way to drive new traffic and customer conversions at a low overall cost.  As part of our launch week activities, we’ll be demonstrating our browser-based system at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, which opens tonight and continues through April 3, 2009 at the Moscone West Convention Center.  And we’ve got to admit it: we’re all pretty darn proud of what we’ve accomplished and are really looking forward to showing it off!

The Yield Web Marketing Suite, which up until now was in private beta, is built with small and mid-size businesses in mind.  Primarily, our team has responded to the long-standing desire to make search marketing more simple and intuitive. By combining and automating the three key elements of search marketing – paid search, natural search and landing page optimization – within a single, completely automated system, the Yield Web Marketing Suite helps folks like you work smarter.  And because the system seamlessly integrates with the three major search engines – Google, Yahoo! Search and Microsoft’s Live Search – we think a lot of people who’ve been sitting on the sidelines will now become more engaged.

And let’s face it: search marketing is the most effective way to attract new traffic and revenue, especially in such a tough economy when marketing budgets are lean. Moreover, the team here at Yield Software has spent more than two years building a system that works day and night to help our customers optimize all their search marketing programs so they don’t have to—making the whole process much more efficient.

Here’s how:

First: we help your company rank as high in natural (and therefore free) search results as possible.

Second: we work to get your paid ads placed in the right position on search engine results pages at the right price.

Third: we make sure clicks on each of those links lead to landing pages that are optimized to convert prospects to paying customers.

Each of these activities, by themselves, can be complex and time consuming, and often require constant supervision in order to achieve success.  Up until now businesses have been forced to piece together a range of tools and third-party experts to address the totality of their Web marketing needs, none of which interoperate or play well together.  To address this we’ve built our system to automate, simplify and optimize each of these three Web marketing components within a single interface:

Paid Search

Enables pay-per-click (PPC) campaign set-up for one, two or all three of the major search engines, including geo-targeting.

Determines, establishes and constantly optimizes keyword bids to meet targeted outcomes within budget constraints.

Optimizes bids and budget allocation based on traffic, conversion or conversion value.

Natural Search

Continually analyzes Web pages for conformance to search engine optimization (SEO) best practices.

Provides an easy-to-understand description of each best practice.

Provides clear instructions for addressing and resolving any areas of improvement.

Landing Pages

Enables the creation of multivariate landing page experiments using a simple visual interface to create different versions of a page.

Provides easy step-by-step instruction for implementing experiments.

Automatically displays the most successful versions of a landing page more frequently, optimizing conversion rates over time.

Dan Kaplan, one of our private beta users, recently blogged about his experience at PeriscopeUp, and he had this to say (which we loved):

“I’ve been involved as a beta user of Yield Software and these guys have done a great job of making a hard problem seem easy.  They make it easy to use and get started, even for people who have little experience in search engine marketing, and it gives me the flexibility, as a professional, to apply my knowledge on top of their optimization algorithms. It also saves me a ton of time.”

Yield Software is offering all new subscribers to our Yield Web Marketing Suite a free 30-day trial.  Because the system is a Web application, no downloads or systems integration work is required, and there are no contracts so subscribers are able to cancel their subscriptions at any time.  Following the 30-day trial period, promotional pricing starts at $129 per month.  For more information or to subscribe to the free 30-day trial, go here.

Let me close by saying thank you to our amazing group of engineers, led by the fearless Matthew Baird, and product folks (with new mom-times-two Jenae Wiegert leading the charge) for getting us to this point.  I’m biased, but I think we have the best team anyone could hope for and I’ve witnessed first-hand the blood, sweat and tears they’ve put into making our new Web Marketing Suite the best there is.  And I really mean it when I say we’re lucky for the leaders we have: Matt Malden, our CEO and co-founder and John Coker, our CTO and co-founder are the best and brightest around.  These guys have not slept much in two years and the strength of our new offering shows it.  It’s a privilege to work with everyone here at Yield Software.

Still nothing (and no one) is perfect.  We’d love to hear from you about what you love (of course) and also what you think we can do better.  With your continuous input and guidance, we know we can get as close to perfection as possible.  You can send us an email at support@yieldsoftware.com or a tweet on Twitter–we’ll definitely be paying attention!

K.I.S.S.

Landing pages – the places on your site where people land after clicking on one of your sites links in the search engines – are often your first formal introduction to a new visitor to your website.  Landing pages can also have a huge impact on where you show up in natural and sponsored results on search engines like Google, Yahoo! Search, and Microsoft Live Search.

Landing pages can include your site’s homepage, but are usually pages within your website that are created specifically for people who click on links for your site that appear in sponsored or natural search results, and pertain to a specific offer, promotion or campaign.

Here at Yield Software, we often hear from our small and medium size business clients that they want better landing pages, but just don’t know what they can do given limited time and resources.  So, in an effort to be helpful, I’ve come up with a short list of six recommendations that will enable you to create simple, easy-to-implement landing pages for your small or growing business.

Step One: Ask the question “Who am I / what is my business?” One of the major mistakes small businesses make is that it is not crystal clear what product or service they provide.  These folks cloud their offerings in fancy acronyms meaningful to their employees but not their prospects.  Or they are overly general, saying things like “Leading provider of value added solutions.”  Find clarity about who you are and work on describing what you offer in the clearest language possible.  Avoid jargon, “inside the beltway” chatter and acronyms not universally known or understood.

Step Two: Establish the goal for your landing page. Are you trying to generate sales? Do you want to increase the uptake of a free trial?  Or is your landing page a lead generation tool?  Be sure you’re clear what you want from your landing page.  According to statistics, you only have about three seconds before the visitor hits the “back” button.  Having a clear goal will ensure you make the most of those precious seconds.

Step Three: Reinforce your keywords. If you don’t already have a keyword list – that is, a list of words or phrases people might naturally type into a search engine that most closely pertain to your own goods or services – make one now.  Make sure that the keywords you bid on are contained in your PPC ads and also in your natural search engine listings.  Then, be sure your keywords are naturally incorporated into the headlines and body copy of your landing page.  In other words, don’t just stuff a bunch of keywords randomly on the page – it’s got to make sense to any normal person who reads it.

Step Four:  Present an obvious call-to-action. When people do a search on Google or other leading search engines, they are almost always declaring an intention.  They’re looking for something.  If that something happens to be YOUR something, it’s best to give them an immediate next step to take when they arrive on your site.  So be sure there is a clear, obvious call-to-action that helps your visitor get what they’re looking for. Be sure it’s the first thing any normal person would notice when first scanning your landing page.

Step Five: Remember the old “K.I.S.S.” lesson (keep it simple, stupid!). You’ve heard it a thousand times before so don’t forget it now: less is more.  Keep your pages uncluttered and free from too many options.  This means one or two (smallish) graphics; no more than three bullets in a list; and avoiding dense copy blocks (for instance, line spacing at 1.5 or double).  When your visitors click on your links it is likely because they are looking for something very specific.  So address that need – and that need only.  If you must present options (small, medium, large, etc.), keep the presentation of those options very basic and easy-to-understand.

Step Six: Measure as much as you can. You can use free tools such as Google Analytics on your site to measure all sorts of user behaviors while folks are visiting your site.  You can also look at how many people click on your links, how many hit the “back” button, how many heed your call-to-action, and how many of those convert to a sale.  Why is this important?  This is information you can use to make your landing pages better and better over time.

More sophisticated Web marketers will go to the extra effort to personalize the landing page for each individual visitor to the extent possible.  Amazon.com and several other e-tailers are masters at this, and paying attention to how they do it can be very instructive.

But there’s time to get to the harder stuff a little later on.  Landing pages don’t have to be highly designed or super-sophisticated destinations that suck all your time and resources.  But they do have to be simple, focused, efficient and effective.  Following these six easy steps can help you toward these ends.

Small Plug: I would also like you to know that our Yield Web Marketing Suite includes powerful landing page optimization (LPO) tools that, when used in concert with a pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign on the major search engines, can automatically test and optimize your landing pages so only the right pages are at work for you.  We’ve got a free 30-day trial, so there’s no cost to you to give it a try.

Go here for more information.

To see our blog post on LPO, go here.

To see our entire Web Marketing 101 blog series, go here.

When people do searches on Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft and click on links inside the search engine results page, they’re clicking on one of two kinds of links: Sponsored or Natural (also called organic).

Landing Page Optimization (LPO) is concerned with ensuring that once someone has landed on your site, they do what you hope they will do (i.e., buy your products!).

Simply put, LPO is the process by which owners of websites improve the landing page experience to maximize the chance a visitor will either (i) extensively browse the site; (ii) return to the site for multiple visits, perhaps even bookmarking it; (iii) recommend the site to others through one of a variety of means; and / or (iv) become a paying customer of the goods or services offered on the site.

So, to summarize, most web marketers use LPO to profitably engage a visitor while keeping the sales cycle short.  The degree to which a landing page is optimized to reach these goals can often mean the difference between sales success and failure.

A first and key rule for landing page optimization is to ensure that the content of the landing page is consistent with the sponsored or natural search link copy that generated the click to your site in the first place.

For instance, say you sell organic sunflower seeds to home gardeners from your website. If a person doing a search on “world peace” clicks on a link to your website that says “Prescriptions for World Peace” and then lands on a page that says “Grow flowers and spread happiness – buy the world’s best organic sunflowers seeds here”, those visitors will likely be disappointed at not finding what they were looking for.  And they’ll immediately click off your page (which is called a “bounce”).

There are two consequences for bounces. First, if you paid for that click through a PPC campaign, you’ve lost any hope of converting those marketing dollars into revenue.  Second, the major search engines pay attention to bounce-offs.  They count them. (Heck, they count everything!)  And those bounce-offs are dings against your natural search placement on search pages.

By ensuring that your landing page is consistent with your link copy, you increase the likelihood that you’ll meet the expectations of all those who arrive on your site.  In fact, the degree to which you’re able to customize landing pages to speak directly to each individual visitor will have enormous impacts on conversion-to-sale metrics.

For instance, more sophisticated web marketers will build landing page experiences that dynamically adjust based on the information they have about the visitor.  This is called LPO targeting.  There are three types of LPO-based targeting (adapted from Wikipedia):

Passive Targeting. The content of the landing page automatically changes based on information about the visitor’s search criteria, geographic information, or other data points that can be used to effectively segment your customers.

Active Targeting. The content of the landing page automatically changes based on known information about the customer (e.g., prior purchases, demographic/psychographic/geographic information, etc.) to anticipate future purchase intentions based on predictive analytics (for instance, Amazon does this very well by looking at your past searches and purchases to suggest books or other products you might like.)

Social Targeting. The content of the landing page automatically changes by drawing upon publicly available information using a system based on reviews, ratings, tagging, referrals, etc.

Many web marketers will opt to test just a few versions of landing pages to determine which perform best – that is, to see which page coverts the highest number of visitors into paying customers.  This is called LPO experimentation.  According to Wikipedia, there are two types of LPO based on experimentation:

Closed-ended Experimentation. Consumers are exposed to several variations of landing pages while their behavior is observed. At the conclusion of the experiment, an optimal page is selected based on the outcome of the experiment.

Open-ended Experimentation. This approach is similar to closed-ended experimentation, except that the experimentation is ongoing, meaning that the landing page is adjusted dynamically as the experiment results change.

By doing this kind of experimentation, you are able to maximize the profit potential of every single new and returning visitor to your site.  By constantly optimizing – that is, by running open-ended experiments – you can ensure that landing pages are always updated to reflect the dynamics of any given moment in time, keeping landing pages fresh and relevant.

Small Plug: For most small business owners and web marketing novices, LPO can sound extremely difficult and tough to manage.  But it doesn’t have to be.  Our Yield Web Marketing Suite includes useful and easy-to-use LPO module that does the work of both closed-ended and open-ended experiments for you.  You get simple to-do lists that give you quick tasks before the system takes over the heavy lifting for you.  Because the system never sleeps, you can rest assured that only ideally-performing pages are favored over time to get you the best outcomes for your web marketing investments.

For more information on the Yield Web Marketing Suite LPO Module, go here.

To see more blog posts in our Introduction to Web Marketing Series, go here.