Tools for Landing Page Optimization
Is your online presence optimized? Last month, we talked about how to write for landing pages, but we didn’t tell you the importance of revising and optimizing it. The internet is an ever-changing landscape that you need to move and adapt with to get the best results. The keywords you ranked for last year may not be performing as well as they used to. So let’s do a refresher on how to do keyword research! We did a full blog on the topic, which you can read here. A keyword is a specific word or phrase that someone types into a search engine. Every keyword is ranked through Ahrefs (a tool used to analyze how well keywords are ranking on search engines) by relevance, how difficult it is to get on the front page of search engines, how many people are searching for it, and so on. A strong keyword with the easiest potential to run is one with a high search volume and a high number of clicks. The difficult refers to how hard it will be to breach the first page of search engines. The more keywords you have strewn into your content, the better chance you have at a potential lead stumbling across your business. But that doesn’t mean you should just overload your website: keep it simple, keep it relevant, and keep your original keyword/keyphrase in the forefront. Remember Hick’s Law: people will take longer to make a decision if they have more options to choose from, if they make a decision at all. Believe it or not, this applies to search engines too! So don’t overload your landing page with keywords, phrases, and calls to actions. Keep it easy to navigate so you can direct your potential leads to where you want them to go. But we already talked about all that in past blogs. Let’s introduce something new: using tools to track how to optimize your landing pages.
Track your Data with Google Analytics
Do you know what bounce rate means? It’s the percentage of visitors who navigate away from your site after viewing only one page. A bounce rate in the range of 26 to 40 percent is excellent, while one in the range of 41 to 55 percent is considered average. If your bounce rate is above 70% then you need to work at optimizing your page as it is clearly not resonating with the intended audience.
But how do you know what your bounce rate is? That’s where Google Analytics comes in. The tool allows you to see various statistics of how people are interacting with your website over periods of time, such as time on page, click through rate (CTR), and bounce rate. You can see how your landing pages are performing based on these data points. It is a great starting point for you to see which of your landing pages, if any, are underperforming and which ones are excelling. However, Google Analytics isn’t very precise — it won’t tell you why or where people are bouncing off your page, it will just tell you the average number of people leaving. While you have an idea of what page is underperforming, which is enough to start optimizing it, you can go more in depth with your review with other online tools.
Using Heat Maps to Optimize Landing Pages
Have you ever seen a thermographic (infrared) camera? The camera basically tracks movement based on heat signatures — the hotter the image, the redder it will be. A heat map for landing pages works the same way. HotJar is a great tool to track your landing pages’ heat signatures, as well as what viewers are interacting with the most. You can create a heat map for any page of your website. HotJar creates a visual representation of how many people scrolled to the bottom of your page. For instance, every page starts red, with 100% of viewers seeing above the fold. As you navigate down the page, the colors shift to orange, yellow, green, and so on, to show you where people are leaving. Every color is accompanied by a percentage as well, which lets you know how many people bounced from your site and where they decided to leave.
You can use this information to optimize where people are bouncing off your page so it better fits their interests and needs. For instance, if 20% of your users are dropping off right below the fold (where the website cuts off on a screen), then you need to add content that entices them to scroll further. Consider updating headlines and text, adding content, or swapping out photos or featured products. No one knows your demographics better than you — so keep your website as up to date as possible with what they want.
How to Optimize your Landing Pages
If you want to optimize your landing pages, you need to know where people are going and when they are leaving. Using tools such as Google Analytics and HotJar are essential to gaining that knowledge. Once you have it, you can do more keyword research, update the website with more (or less) content, and begin testing once more. Optimization is a never-ending cycle that needs to be done if you want your website and landing pages to reach the coveted first page of Google. It can be a daunting task, so why not trust experts with handling it for you? Give us a call to see how Helix House can optimize your business!
