First impressions matter a lot in eCommerce. Landing Pages can be Categories, Products, Content Heavy Pages (blog posts), or your Homepage. In this article, we’re going to go through how professionals execute Landing Page Optimization and we’re going to share a routine you can start using today.
Most businesses focus on their homepages and while that is not bad, it’s definitely not as relevant for sales as categories or product pages are.
Homepages get 1-5% of your page views because most of the traffic you get from organic and paid channels will go to your category, product, and content pages. If those pages are not kept in check, that traffic will never see your homepage.
The good news (there’s no bad news) is that of all the clients I’ve ever worked with, Landing Pages were optimized in a chaotic manner (if at all) just based on what the user felt was going to look good. This means you have a huge advantage over your competitors because you will be able to optimize your Landing Pages correctly.
Create a 30-60 minutes weekly recurring task in your calendar where you check the top 20-30 Landing Pages in Google Analytics.
Get the page URLs exported on a Google Sheet together with a single KPI (in the beginning), the Bounce Rate.
The Bounce Rate represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave (“bounce“) rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site.
The purpose of this recurring task is to get the Bounce Rate to go down, week after week. When the Bounce Rate goes down, you will get more traffic on other pages of your website. This will help improve your sales as you will have more opportunities to show products, capture email addresses, etc.
How to reduce the Bounce Rate?
There is no secret formula but it’s not rocket science either. Put yourself in your visitor’s shoes and see if the pages are relevant. I’m going to share a few examples below:
How to reduce Bounce Rates on Category Pages?
- check your layered navigation, your filters. Make sure they are relevant and you do not have duplicate filter values or typos (adidas, ADIDAS, and Adidas, or Mike)
- check you category sorting options and ensure they are relevant
- check the top part of the category page – make sure that visitors CAN see products the second they land on that page and not just a huge banner or too much text
- make sure you have your best selling, most popular products showing up on the first 15-30 positions
- remove any subscription popups from these Landing Pages
- add incentives (product labels) like free shipping, % off, etc.
- fix any missing images and update product titles so that everything looks uniform and clean
- check loading speed and fix potential issues
How to reduce Bounce Rates on Product Pages?
- check your title and ensure it is optimized and user friendly, not just search engines
- make sure you have relevant high-quality product images
- improve your product description
- add related product and upsells (more from the same brand, goes well with these, other people purchased, etc)
- check the loading speed and fix potential issues like optimizing your product image sizes
How to reduce Bounce Rates on blog posts?
- optimize your content if you feel like people are not reading the entire articles
- add links to relevant products and categories and incentives
- add layered navigation
- ensure the main navigational menu matches that of your eCommerce store
- check loading speed and fix anything you can
Follow the above steps for one month and you will see your website’s Global Bounce Rate drop and your sales will increase.
Once you have mastered this we can move into more advanced Landing Page Optimization tasks like improving Average Time on Page and using Heatmapping Tools.
Reach out to me below and I’ll help you get started with the first time landing page optimization task.
Read about another recurring task you can start right away that will give you a great competitive advantage and follow our step-by-step guide to On-site Search Optimization.
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