Last week I took part in a teleconference with Anne Holland (Content Director) and Tim McAtee (Senior Analyst) at MarketingSherpa. The call, “Top 5 Tests to Raise Landing Page Conversions” offered insight on how to get the most from your website and drive visitors towards completing your desired goal. Both a PDF and full MP3 of the call have been made available on the MarketingSherpa website.
The teleconference brought to light a number of great tips for increasing the conversion rate of your landing pages, whether from PPC or organic search. Here are 6 tips I found to be of interest.
1. PPC Search Dynamic Changes
One thing they showed that had an impact on conversions was the simple insertion of dynamic code telling visitors where they came from. Its amazing that such a small change to a website could have a positive effect on conversions – their study showed that 68% of sites that employed this technique saw some improvement in conversions.
2. Registration Forms
Short, simple registration forms tend to convert better.
3. Eye Flow
Make the eye flow of you site much easier to follow. By simplifying landing pages and reducing the number of columns you will likely help to increase visitor conversions. Their research also noted that this was the exact opposite for Asian Countries, so if you are targeting that area of the world, a busier, more cluttered landing page may serve you best.
4. Type Face
Using black type on a white background with a 12 to 14pt font size works best for conversions; seems that size does matter.
5. Buttons
Bigger buttons lead to more conversions. The bigger the button, within reason, will attract more attention and result in an increase of a desired action by site visitors. One comment made was to stand up and walk 10 feed from your screen. If you could not clearly see the button, then make it bigger. (I suppose that this would have some room for error given the flood of big screen computer monitors available today, so use your discretion.)
6. Internal Pages
Ensure that you have proper call to action etc from internal pages. Not everyone enters a site from the home page. An estimated 79% of visitors from organic search will enter your site on various internals, so be prepared to drive this traffic regardless of where they enter..