Testing Your Landing Pages
Whether you’re using PPC or SEO, search engine visitors have to find you somehow. Due to the way in which each individual page is capable of earnings its own ranking, there are numerous ways for people to enter your site.
This means that every page is effectively your homepage. It is the first one that a visitor sees and it should be the most relevant to their search query. But what happens when some landing pages are experiencing a high bounce or exit rate? What can you do?
Well, identifying the problem is your first issue. Use your analytics to pinpoint any areas that are potentially weak and that could be deterring visitors from venturing further into your site. If there are some pages with the aforementioned high bounce rate, that is usually a good place to start.
Visit the page. Look at it objectively and see if there are any glaringly obvious issues. Is there too much text, does the page have a confusing layout, is there no clear path to the next stage? Some issues will be clearer than others, so it might not be immediately obvious what is actually deterring visitors. This is where testing comes in.
To effectively test the landing pages you will need to have an understanding of the searcher’s psychology. What are they looking for? What do they expect? This isn’t within the grasp of everybody, but take the time to determine what makes an effective page that achieves conversions.
Button positions and even the colour of your call to action can make all the difference. They might seem like small things, but if your visitor is wasting their time hunting around your page for a button to purchase an item or to contact you, will they really hang around?
To test your landing pages you need to set up alternative versions of the same page. This means testing elements against one another. So if you think that the text might be unhelpful, try another version and send half of your traffic to the alternative and the other half to your original. Over time a pattern of abandonment will develop and you can establish exactly which is the most effective.
This kind of testing can be done across numerous page elements, often simultaneously. The more traffic that you have to the page, the easier it will be to spot patterns emerging though. You will also need to set up proper goals and have the proper landing page optimisation understanding to carry out this testing effectively.
You don’t want to keep chopping and changing the content on your one site to see what works, which is why this is so effective as an alternative. It won’t ruin the look of your page and you can switch off the alternatives whenever you need to.
But by testing your landing pages thoroughly, you can ensure that your website really starts to convert. You can fix problems and help make good pages great.
