This is not best practice. This is a method to help you find what will work for you - this list is five tactics you can do yourself to learn about your landing page.
There are thousands of articles on best practice for landing pages. They cover everything from headlines to images, buttons to CTAs, social proof to form length, and everything in between. But none of them cover what works specifically for your business, your processes and most importantly, your customers.
Nine times out of 10, best practice won’t work particularly well for you. The perfect page for your customers only exists from trial and error, understanding your customers, building for them and then testing your assumptions. It doesn’t exist in the thousands of blogs on “best practice landing pages” - there are 95,300,000 pages on the subject in Google.
So how do you build the perfect landing page for your customers?
The Alders model has analysed thousands of pages to best understand how to make it easy for a customer to interact - buy, become a lead, take action. It uses a complex algorithm supported and developed from the experience of leading marketing functions in healthcare, financial and professional services, ecommerce and lead generation. The Alders model is able to analyse all the decision-making factors in a purchase to help design the perfect landing page, and customer funnel.
But it’s possible to recreate some of these elements manually.
I’m going to show you five methods that can help you unlock faults with your page so you can identify the biggest issues and points of friction for your customers. From there you can fix these problems.
1. Is your landing page a landing page?
After reading this article, search on your phone for what your business offers (don’t do a brand search), click the advert and see what page you land on.
✅ Visible in the search results?
✅ Paid traffic lands on a specific landing page (not one you are trying to rank in Google)
If you don’t tick both these boxes - he’s your first thing to fix.
Having specific landing pages for paid search is fundamental to the success of a campaign. It allows you to test and iterate, try different positions and propositions, decrease and increase prices and develop offers, all while protecting your core site. In our experience, if you’re not using landing pages, you’re missing out on at least a 20% improvement in performance.
If you’re not using landing pages, you’re not alone. Around 80% of businesses aren’t using them correctly.
2. When was the last time you bought from yourself?
Continue the journey from above and take action - buy, become a lead, book a call - whatever your CTA is, do it.
✅ Was it easy?
✅ What happened? Did you expect that to happen?
✅ Does the next step inspire you, or is there room for improvement?
3. Watch someone else do what you just did
Ask a friend, spouse, colleague, (me), or anyone to do the same process in steps 1 and 2.
✅ Did they find it easy?
✅ What happened? Was it the same as what you did?
✅Ask them this: if this was their business what one thing would they do to improve the process?
4. Repeat Step 3, four more times.
In product development, one of the first “rules” a lot of UXers are taught is that for user testing, the minimum number of participants is 5. Get that many participants and you'll get 80% of the issues. Everything after that is incremental learnings.
5. Repeat with people you don’t know
Sign up to a user testing tool like UserFeel. They will use paid website testers to review you site. Again, you’ll want to do another 5 tests.
Give them this brief:
Go to Google and search for this keyword [your product/service] + Brand Name*
Visit the site and take the next action to purchase. Explain why you took this action.
Answer the following questions while navigating through the site:
We wanted you to buy/enquire/book/etc, was this clear to you? How could this be improved?
What did you see that gave you confidence to take this action?
What did you see that would lead you to question our ability to provide this service/action?
After taking the action, what did you expect to happen?
Did this meet your expectations?
How could we improve this customer journey?
What is the one thing we could do to improve this customer journey?
*Test this one yourself first - do you appear for [your product / service] + brand? Is it a landing page in paid search or an organic page? If you’re not bidding on these terms, you need to speak to your PPC agency. There are two sides to the argument on whether to bid on brand or not:
You don’t need to bid on brand because you’re getting the traffic already, so in effect paying for it twice.
You do need to bid on brand because:
Your competitors can, and pick up high intent search without having to invest to generate the original traffic. They can then also position directly against you.
Your organic listing may not be the best page for them to visit
You can control the landing page you send them to so you can test and improve.
At the end of these 5 steps - you should be able to do this all within a week (normally just a few days). You should have a list of issues with your site and some significant opportunities to make it easier for your customers to buy.
If it’s a short list, go and fix it. If it’s a long list, use the ICE score to prioritise.
If these feels like a lot of work, Alders can do it for you, for a lot less than you would expect. Get in touch with me today and we can go through it in more detail.
Tl;dr
You can double, triple and even 10x conversion rate with just a few hours of work of user testing landing pages.