Why is it important to optimize your landing page toward conversions?

Firstly, you may have a crack SEO team working for you, ensuring that you’ve got maximum visibility. But visibility means nothing if you can’t convert the traffic that you receive. And converting traffic is highly dependant (for one) how well your landing page is optimized toward your goals. In a B2B context, where purchases decisions are weighed much more carefully, these optimization factors are crucial to your conversion rate. Look at it this way, when a visitor hits your landing page, you have his undivided attention – better make it count for something.

So, for the purposes of this article let us assume that you’re already driving sufficient traffic to your pages but can’t seem to convert them. Here’s short guide on how to effect profitable conversions.

1. Your landing page should try to build as much credibility as possible. B2B customers value industry accolades, peer reviews and prestigious memberships much more than the B2C market, so break the big guns out onto the landing page. If your industry has honored you with an award, an affiliation or even a certification of excellence, feature it prominently. If you have many accolades, treat them like credentials and place them all on a sidebar. The effect such an arrangement has on a B2B prospect is similar to the one a master resume might have on recruiting personnel.

2. Ensure that your landing pages take a strong line as far as branding is concerned. Include your logo, official colors, fonts and any other strong brand differentiators. Also, keep the style and tone of any and all copy more or less consistent with the rest of your website – fluctuating between corporate hard sell and fluffy soft sell, isn’t going to do your business any favors. A consistent tone and style, however, will build trust while demonstrating that you don’t suffer from dissociative identity disorder and aren’t willing to dilute your cultivated brand with insipid commercial messages.

3. However, this doesn’t mean that you cannot deliver a powerful call to action, even if your literature seems subdued and not peppy. Try to be honest and succinct with the copy on your landing page – no one likes rambling sales talk. Explain the benefits of your product and end with a killer value proposition while using graphical cues to highlight your call to action. Additionally, you may want to include a relatively large, very obvious button that goads visitors into making that final click.

4. Placing your finger on exactly what motivates your customers is pretty difficult and besides, it’s a fine line to toe – which is why you need to test everything on your landing page to determine what combination of factors will help you strike conversional gold. From the size and placement of your registration form to the size, font and meaning of your headlines and copy, everything must be tested until you find yourself receiving optimum results.

5. Imagine that you’ve tested for almost every possible factor and you’re receiving what you think are optimum results. Now stop imagining impossibilities and get back to work. Testing and optimizing your landing pages is a relentless and ongoing process that never, ever ends. Good luck and godspeed.

6. Create multiple landing pages for your most important key words. This will help add relevance to your product and brand in the user’s eyes. Trust me, there are few things more compelling that seeing your generic search query mirrored on a landing page. Unfortunately, however, it’s almost impossible to adapt this technique to a long tail market – there are way too many queries and you can’t possible create as many landing pages.

7. What qualifies as a lead? How much data do you need to collect before you can assess a lead in terms of qualitative value? Well the answer to those questions may vary from industry to industry, but under ideal circumstances, your registration form should definitely include the following fields: name, company, phone number and email address. You may add extra fields, but know that many prospects tend to navigate away when faced with the tedium of filling out an extensive form so try to exercise restraint and ask only for essential, easy-to-remember information.

8. Deliver on every promise. THIS IS CRITICAL. Do not make any claims on your landing page that you have no intention of fulfilling, because there is nothing that can drag your brand down to the depths of hell quite like a horde of dissatisfied customers.

And that brings this list to a close. Hope it helps! Do you have any tips to share with regard to landing page optimization? Drop a comment and let us know.