Running Google ads on your website can be a lot promising in terms of sales and conversion. But how can you know that your landing page will help you in achieving high sales? No doubt, advertising boosts your conversion rates and hence, sales but it is your landing page that has to deliver and seal the deal. Therefore, it is highly crucial to optimize your landing page and in order to do that, you need to know and understand some landing page best practices.

Keep reading below and you’ll understand how you can optimize your landing page in the best possible way.

What does landing page optimization exactly mean?

Before we go on learning the landing page best practices, we need to know what exactly landing page optimization is.

Landing page optimization refers to the improvement of each element present on your landing page to increase conversions. Instead of redesigning the entire page by going with your gut, you take some help from anecdotal evidence and statistics.

By optimizing your website, you can assemble all the required data before running your website. For instance, you can better understand what your targeted audience is looking for by surveying your audience’s actions.

However, one thing to keep in mind is that you can’t redo your entire landing page right away. You have to run your website and redesign the landing page by tracking your conversion rate and evaluating the gathered data.

Why is landing page optimization important for Google ads?

If you see that your customers aren’t going beyond your first page, it’s time to redo your landing page. You need to design your landing page in such a way that your customers have a great landing page experience. Now, landing page experience is known as the quality of a customer’s experience when they are on your website. Your customers will only be able to make a purchase if they can easily reach the shopping basket.

In addition to this, your landing page’s quality directly impacts your quality score, bounce rate, ad rank position, and the complete costs incurred. If most of your customers are leaving your website without making a purchase, your adverts may not appear as frequently as they should be. In this case, your landing page is the culprit and you need to start thinking to make some changes to it.

Best practices for landing page optimization 

If you want to turn clicks into conversions, you need to optimize your landing page in the best possible way. The process of optimizing your landing page starts the minute you develop your website and make it go live. However, it will take some time to bore the fruit of success.

For instance, if you create a certain product, you won’t make it impeccable just after the first try. You’ll need to try again and again till you get that perfect product. The same is the case with the landing pages. Your landing pages must attract your customers and entice them to make a purchase.

In order to do this, there are some landing page best practices that you need to consider to achieve higher conversions, and ultimately sales.

Landing page best practices no. 1 – Make sure your messaging is consistent with your ads 

If you want to boost your conversion rate, you need to choose the language and style of the landing page that matches with the advertisements you’re running on Google ads. In this way, your customers will make a “good click”.

For instance, if your ad is about retirement communities and it directs your visitors to a landing page for luxurious condos, it might turn off pretty much all your users. Therefore, you need to make sure that your ads and landing page stay on the same message. If you’re running ads with various headlines, you can use Dynamic Text Replacement or create variant pages.

Landing page best practices no. 2 – Make sure the action is visible above the fold 

Above the fold is referred to as the upper half of the front page of the newspaper. However, today, it is referred to as what we see on the screen before we scroll down. This “above the fold” part is quite precious and you need to get the most out of it.

The above the fold area must contain your title, sales pitch, and call to action. In this way, your visitors will know what they are getting themselves into. However, don’t stuff too much information above the fold because then, it will be difficult for your visitors to view your call to action. Just make sure, whatever your visitors need is displayed above the fold.

Landing page best practices no. 3 – Direct the eye with directional cues 

Your landing page is supposed to be short and nothing really is displayed below the fold. Thus, in this case, you’ll need some visual cues to make your visitors scroll downwards. You can use physical markers like animations, arrows, images, or any other shape that makes the visitors keep going down.

However, you need to make your call to action to stand out in the midst of all these shapes and visual cues. You can use contrasting, bright colors and easy-to-recognize shapes. If you want to bring more attention to it, you can go as far as placing a picture of people pointing at it.

Landing page best practices no. 4 – Integrate social proof 

Most of your customers have already heard all the marketing jargon. Unless you come up with something very creative, it would be time-wasting because your visitors won’t just buy what you’re telling. In such cases, it is better to provide them with proof and integrate the voices of your happy customers. Such testimonials from your community members may provide an unmatchable level of assurance to your visitors.

We, humans, are followers and we don’t want to be the first to buy something. We want approval from others. Therefore, social proofing is highly crucial when it comes to buying something from a brand.

But your visitors don’t need those testimonials that are coming from Jane Doe or anonymous users. In order to satisfy your customers, you need to provide the personal details of your customers that include their names, place of residence, job titles, dates of purchases, and even their photographs and videos.

Landing page best practices no. 5 – Use copy that is clear as well as appealing

Your copy shouldn’t read like a copy at all. Just like the back of the cereal box, it must be easy to read and understand. However, there are some services that make you integrate longer materials which, in turn, results in longer landing pages. However, make sure you use fewer paragraphs, bulleted lists, and eye-catching content.

Landing page best practices no. 6 – Keep the loading of your page fast 

Nobody wants to wait on a website and see that loading sign. In fact, according to a study, about 70% of people lose interest and don’t make a purchase if the website doesn’t load fast enough. Therefore, make sure that your landing page loads faster and it shouldn’t take more than 3 seconds to load. In this way, you won’t lose any potential clients and keep making sales.

Landing page best practices no. 7 – Use scarcity techniques

People tend to make more purchases if you use the terms like “limited time” and “limited quantity” because they think that many people have already purchased this product so it is worth it to buy the product. If you use these kinds of scarcity techniques, your visitors might fear missing out on buying one of the best products. Thus, they feel compelled to buy the product.

Landing page best practices no. 8 – Make your call-to-action buttons as simple as possible

The most crucial part of your landing page is the call-to-action. Call-to-action is the aspect of the landing page that not only motivates your visitors but also gives them a reason to click on your Google ads. Call-to-action also provides your visitors with the reassurance that they will get what they see on the screen.

Your visitors won’t be able to navigate your call-to-action if it’s not easy to recognize and understand. Therefore, make it as simple, obvious, and straightforward as possible. You can also guide your visitors to use your call-to-action. You can use Download Now, Get a free trial, Subscribe Now, etc.

Landing page best practices no. 9 – Include your contact details 

Let your visitors know that they can contact you at any time and you’re easily reachable in case of any query or an issue. This helps in connecting your brand and visitors in a way that is certainly unparalleled. Therefore, make sure that you add your contact details on your landing page. Now, there are plenty of ways through which you can do this. You can put on a contact form, your email address, or your phone number. Whatever suits you the best.

Landing page best practices no. 10 – Experiment with different headlines 

No doubt, images, and videos can grab the attention of your visitors but don’t think that words aren’t powerful enough to grab the same amount of attention. On the contrary, words can hit your visitors a lot better than images and videos. But if you go with words, make sure that you’re creative and unique with what you write. You can’t use the same headlines for different ads and expect to see an increase in the conversion rate.

Landing page best practices no. 11 – Pay close attention to the SEO of the landing page 

If you want to optimize your landing page in the best way possible, you need to take some help from SEO. But this raises a serious question, why are you focusing on SEO to optimize your landing page when your entire traffic is driven via ad?

This is not always the case.

Your Google ads do drive some traffic to your landing page but what about those who don’t view your ads? You want those people to be a part of your brand community, right? So, in order to influence those people who don’t see your ads, you need SEO. Select the primary and secondary keywords wisely and sprinkle them all over the content of your landing page. However, you need to make sure that you’re using H (headline) tags and image alt attributes in the best way possible.

Landing page best practices no. 12 – Make sure your landing page is mobile-friendly 

As of today, mobile phones drive about 60% of the traffic to your landing page and no one wants to lose this much traffic. Therefore, you need to make sure that your landing page is mobile-friendly and quick to respond because otherwise, you’ll lose a good bunch of traffic. Not just mobile phones, make sure your landing page is easily accessible through all the electronic devices such as tablets, laptops, iPads, mobile phones, etc.

All the landing page best practices are mentioned above and if you want to optimize your landing page in the best possible way, make sure you incorporate all of them. Make a checklist and cross out the ones that you’ve already done to your landing page. In this way, you’ll know which part needs your utmost attention.

We have talked about how landing page optimization can increase your conversions. But how many conversions does a brand need to be successful? Let’s find out.

What is the reasonable conversion rate for a landing page?

According to WordStream, the average conversion rate across different industries is about 2.35%. On the other hand, when we look at the top 25% of landing sites, they have a conversion rate of 5.31% or even more in some cases. It may be astonishing to know that the top 10% of the landing sites convert at 11%!

We didn’t mean to give you an anxiety attack by telling you all these figures. In general, conversion rates depend entirely upon the marketing goals and optimization techniques of a company. In some cases, the conversion rate of one company may not bore the same fruit of success for another company.

Thus, if you want to maximize your conversion rate, just focus on optimizing your landing page using the landing page best practices and you’ll be good to go!

Some last words 

The best landing practice is undoubtedly easy to navigate. Make sure the design of your landing page is easy to understand, it has enhanced SEO, is quick to respond on mobile phones and other devices, and the call-to-action provides your visitors what they were promised. Other than this, if you incorporate all the mentioned-above practices, there’s no one who can stop you from maximizing your conversion rate and sales.

We hope you got everything you were looking for. Now stop procrastinating and optimize your landing page, now!