1. Check out the Competition – Research
Run through a handful of searches you want to appear for and then look at your competitions landing pages for these terms.
When looking at these pages be the buyer, are any of them doing it for you. This is your benchmark, your page needs to do a better job than these.
2. Headline – Grab it
Compose an attention grabbing, traffic halting, eye popping, positive buying short headline. You must also bear in mind that the headline of your landing page must match or be similar to the headlines you are using in your ads. They must follow the same theme, be consistent.
You could use keyterms to start the page headline like:
- Secret to …
- Learn how to…
- Find out why…
3. Write the Pitch
Write just a short paragraph of compelling, cannot live without, text, this is your opener. Now depending on what you are selling you may need way more copy. Think: do you need to do a job with this page? Will the potential customer have got to your page out of necessity? For Example: are you selling, loans, credit cards, insurance (essentials) or are you selling a product or service which is non essential like clothes or books or music.
I usually stick to the rule that if the product/service is essential then short bulleted copy, usually your USP’s, with 2 professional pics or illustrations does the trick. BUT if the product/service is non essential then you may need the space to sell why you are better than your neighbor, use persuasive copy. Here are some examples:
4. Minimise on Your Route / Path
Ensure when a customer lands on your landing page it is as clutter free as possible, and there is a clear established path to your ultimate GOAL, eg, you may use arrows guiding the way. All the navigation that exists on your normal website page layouts must be removed, so strip them off, with the exceptions of:
- About Us
- Contact Us
- Sitemap
- Home
These are needed for your PPC ads, quality score, Cher wrote about this a while back.
5. GOOOAAAALLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!
What is yours? Is it a lead, subscription, sale, email address, comment…. no matter what your goal is your form fields must look easy, short, trusting, oh and did I say short. DO NOT make your goal so unapproachable that no matter how excellent a sales pitch you deliver there is no way anyone will tackle your uninviting form. Example below:
- Bad form example
- While searching for my bad example (above) I came across this diamond, http://www.aquacard.co.uk/404.aspx , I did forget to mention that the worst landing page is the 404 one. This page was straight from an adwords ad paying top whack for a generic premium keyterm, shame on you.
Always only ask the bear minimum in your form, what can you get by with? and what can you gather at a later date? If the customer buying a product or service from you then you will have another opportunity to get the info.
6. What Now?
OK so your page is now kinda done (well done), what you need to do now is set up your PPC ads to match your page style and theme and get them live. Let it run then test test test.
There are some excellent tools out there to help with your A/B or multivariant testing, some are listed below.
Then just keep on testing, and get those conversions higher.
Please feel free to comment with any more tried and tested A/B and Multi variant testing tools.
Nic
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