How to Optimise Your Ecommerce Landing Page

Your landing page is the first contact a visitor has with your website after clicking on a link, and if you want to convert those visitors into buyers, it’s time to optimize those landing pages. Here are a few things you can do to make lower your bounce rates and increase your sales performance.

Testing, testing and more testing

You should have a testing infrastructure in place to accurately measure the success of your landing page. Try A/B testing to perform comparative tests, allowing you to try different landing pages and compare the results to see which performs best. A/B testing is important as you can run simultaneous experiments between 2 (or more, you can A/B test as many pages as you want) landing pages to identify which performs best in terms of converting visitors into customers. Once you have decided what aspect of your landing page you want to A/B test (it could be the headline, any calls to action, the imagery, videos and so on) you can create new different variants of your page to enter into the experiment to see what works and what doesn’t to come up with the optimum page. Don’t forget though, testing doesn't stop there. You’ll want to keep testing your landing page to make sure it’s consistently performing and accurately reflects your products and target audience, both of which will no doubt change over the course of your business’s lifecycle.

Write great copy

If your copy is drab and uninspiring, you can’t expect to hold your visitors’ attention for long enough to convert them into customers. Keep your copy short, simple and effective - your customers have better things to do than spend 20 minutes sifting through a 1,000 word passage on who you are, what you sell, and why it can benefit them; you need to break these points up and keep them concise and to the point, or you’ll risk losing their attention (and will to buy from you). Your landing page is you at a glance; you should have separate pages if you want to go into detail on the history of your business, FAQ’s and so on, or your landing page will look cluttered and confusing. Aside from keeping it short, you also want to make your copy snappy - use words that evoke emotive responses, pique their curiosity, and compel them to take action. Create deadlines to stir up a sense of urgency. Make sure your call to action is short, simple and effective. Then test it and improve it.

Use testimonials

While your website should include a summary of the advantages and benefits you offer over your competition (free shipping, lower prices), you should also try to add some customer testimonials to your landing page because of course you think you’re great, but what to your real-life-actual-customers have to say? It’s great to add some in-depth customer success stories with in-depth analyses of how you’ve helped your loyal customers, but these are perhaps best kept on a separate page; you should stick to short snippets which can be read at a glance. If you receive positive reviews or emails from your customers, contact them with thanks and ask if you can publish their kind words on your landing page. You could also monitor social media to see if you have been mentioned positively, and display those comments on your landing page - Twitter in particular is great for this as Tweets are restricted to 140 characters, perfect to read at a glance. Another method you could use is reaching out to influential people to endorse your products - bloggers with lots of readers, YouTubers with lots of viewers, or even customers with a ton of followers are all great targets to boost your reputation and increase your sales.

Identify and use keywords

Before you begin optimizing your landing page, you need to know which keywords you want to target. Keywords means both singular words like “jewellery” and phrases like  “women’s pendant necklace”. To identify your keywords, think about which words best describe your website and the products and services you offer. Do your research. Try typing these into search engines to see what comes up, take a look at retailers in similar fields to you and have reached high rankings and check out their landing pages - you can use these to identify more keywords and gain inspiration from their landing pages. The keyword planner tool in Google Adwords is also your best friend when it comes to optimizing your landing page. Simply go to your Google Adwords account > Tools > Analysis > Keyword planner, and it will show you how many times a specific keyword has been searched for and give you suggestions on other keywords. What you’re aiming to o here is find variations of keywords that people are using to try and find the products you’re selling, so once you’re here, click on the keywords and ad group ideas to find the variations that people use to find the products that you’re selling.

Be a co-pilot

You need to give your customers a helping hand when it comes to navigating your landing page. If they’re confronted by a convoluted maze of mixed messages, they’re not going to know where to click to get what they want and will most likely abandon ship - one of the main reasons for a high bounce rate is navigation so you want to ensure that your landing page is effective at getting your visitors what they want. Include an easy-to-spot search box that’s always visible so they can resort to that to find what they’re searching for if absolutely necessary, but we don’t want them to have to resort to that - we want them to be able to find exactly what they want with the least amount of effort possible. Include eye-catching buttons and obvious calls to action if you want to reduce bounce rate, and it’s understandable that some retailers will have extensive catalogue of goods, but that’s not an excuse to lay out your website in a cluttered and confusing way - use simple designs and easy-to-navigate drop down menes if you need to clean things up. It also helps to place your eye-catching navigation bar in a place where the user would naturally look - either horizontally at the top of the page, or vertically on the left hand side. There are numerous other ways you can optimize your landing pages, but these few tips are sure to get you on the right track to a great strategy. The most important thing to take away from this is to test, test, test some more and keep on testing to make sure your page is performing well. Need an inventory management software? Try Veeqo for free!