If you are selling products online, you need to have landing pages instead of simply directing customers to your website’s home page. Why is this? It’s because your home page has to do many things – tell customers about your entire business and your entire product lines along with creating an atmosphere that tells the story of your business.

A specific product can get lost on a home page. Landing pages give you one place to direct customers to when they are searching for something particular. A great landing page creates a seamless flow to the product page from the ad or other point of entry that the customer used to get to the landing page. It should all feel like a natural extension of the same campaign.

Conversion rate optimization is all about finding out how to utilize landing page design to get people who visit your site and turn them into customers. But how do you do this? At eVisible, we use our years of experience to help customers develop powerful landing pages for their websites. Here are just a few of the practices that we’ve found can seriously improve a company’s website conversion rate:

BOOSTING CONVERSION RATES CAN BE A LAUGHING MATTER

Too many times, marketing experts translate their serious need to boost their conversion rates to the types of marketing they do. While it’s important to focus on letting customers know how you will solve their specific problems, this doesn’t mean that you can’t use humor to do it. In fact, when done correctly, a humorous marketing campaign can make deep connections with customers and lead to extremely successful viral campaigns.

Here are just a few of the ways that you can use humor in your marketing campaign with an eye on boosting conversion rates:

Use the truth: Customers often expect to get marketing speak and fluffy but pointless copy when they read a website or ad campaign. You can shock them out of this by appealing to them truthfully. Admit that your breath mint won’t cure athlete’s foot, make them wealthy or help them to marry a supermodel, but that it will make their breath smell better.

A matter of extremes: You can also take the opposite approach to attacking your conversion rate. Use playful exaggeration to showcase exactly how great your product is or counteract the claims of your competitors.

Two things that shouldn’t go together: Much comedy consists of humorous situations that arise when two things that should never go together suddenly come together. Think about Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” going somewhere like the opera. You can use incongruities to showcase key elements of your product.

The power of real people: Sometimes all you need to do to create compelling content is let real people be themselves. Some of the most powerful stories can come from customers or employees in unscripted settings talking about the strengths of your company and your products.

Parody for fun and profit: Don’t be afraid to make fun of elements of your business or your industry to make your point. Customers – even those within your industry – want to laugh at familiar things. They even don’t mind laughing at themselves if it’s done right.

Just have fun: Sometimes the best conversion tools are just plain fun. This can be a simple video game, a coloring book or some other fun gadget on your site that attracts attention.

SQUEEZE PAGES DON’T HAVE TO BE A DRAG

Squeeze pages aren’t listings for anacondas that are available to rent at children’s parties. They are landing pages that are specifically designed to solicit opt-in email addresses from potential subscribers. These emails can be used to send out newsletters, email announcements or prospect for new clients. However, just giving away some free information with the promise of more “if you send us your email” doesn’t work – people are just too jaded and protective of their privacy to give up their information.

Instead, you need to be sophisticated with how you construct your squeeze page. It needs to address a specific topic that you know your customers are interested in – in many cases, you want to propose a solution to a common problem. If you can back this up with specific numbers of how you solved the problem, this provides more credibility to your claims.

You need to construct the squeeze page thoughtfully. Start with a powerful headline that speaks to a customer’s problems. Add a call-to-action near the top that lets people know what to expect from the site. Informative videos can help to capture people’s interest. Make sure that you have several ways for people to opt-in at different points on the page. In short, give them a reason to opt-in and there’s a good chance that they will.

FIND YOUR UNIQUE VALUE PROPOSITION AND RUN WITH IT

Studies show that you only have 10 seconds to convince a customer to dig deeper into your website. This means that you have to hook them quickly if you want to convert clicks to cash. The best way to do this is to clearly communicate the Unique Value Proposition of your business – that is, what makes your company a clear choice ahead of your competitors.

How can you do this? Here are a few things to consider:

• Think about what you want customers to feel about your business and convey that immediately.
• Use language that addresses the customer directly and that avoids marketing slogans and jargon.
• Along with discussing the features of your products, lay out how these features will benefit the customer.
• Use real world examples of benefits and uses whenever possible.
• Don’t use tired superlatives touting your business – no one believes these things unless you can back them up with proof.
• Understand the problems that have led customers to search for your company and address these problems – and your solutions to these problems – head on.

Once you have a Unique Value Proposition identified, make that a key component of your entire website. From your home page to individual product pages, reinforce this value proposition over and over again. You should even do this on action pages such as shopping carts to ensure that you close sales. And make sure that you evaluate what your competitors are doing – if their value propositions are vastly different than yours, it’s a sign that either you or them are not connecting with your customers.

Remember that context matters just as much as content when it comes to landing pages. You need to make sure that customers understand exactly how your products will benefit them in real-world terms. Telling them how you can help them is one thing – showing them is something far more powerful. No matter how you attack it, a powerful landing page is the best way to show customers what you are all about.

One of the easiest ways to make more money from your online business is to improve the flow of your eCommerce checkout system. You need to make it as easy as possible for people who are browsing for products on your site to make a purchase. There are many ways to improve this flow rate, but even a slight improvement in conversion rate optimization can lead to a significant increase in profits.

The specifics of how to improve your conversion rate will be unique to your website. You’ll need to do conversion testing and reporting to fully understand what it means for your site. But what motivates a person to decide to make a purchase from a website is universal. Roughly stated, a person makes a purchase because they are motivated to buy a product, have the immediate ability to make a purchase and have been “triggered” to buy.

Getting people motivated and triggered to make a purchase can be as simple as sending out an email and having them click through to your product page. But it takes professional website development in order to give a customer the easiest path to purchase. One secret is to make sure that a customer gets an item into their shopping cart as quickly as possible. This gets them out of the mindset of “just browsing” since they are now officially “shopping.”

It’s important to make it as easy as possible for a person to add something to their shopping cart. The purchase button should be as big and obvious as possible. Once a person adds something to the shopping cart, it should be clear that they have something in the cart. And you need to make sure that the customer can see how to go to the shopping cart to enter in their payment information and complete the purchase at any time.

From a web design standpoint, you also need to consider what happens when a customer gets ready to make a purchase. One consideration is whether or not you require customers to register before buying anything. As a general rule, forcing customers to register creates a barrier that could very easily lead to them not making a purchase. You’ll also want to make sure that you don’t ask for credit card information until the last step in the process. Get all of the shipping and personal information first so that the credit card information is easy to get.

These are just a few of the things that you’ll want to do when you think about your eCommerce set-up. eVisible can help you design an eCommerce system that is right for your industry and business.

Reworking your website to have a more SEO friendly design is a great way to boost your online business’ potential; it can also be intimidating, especially right before your new site goes live. Before you relaunch your site to the world, you need to go through a last-minute checklist to ensure that the launch will be a success. Here are 20 steps that you need to take when finalizing your professional website development:

Onsite Content:

1. Check that all of the content you’ve created – and the old content that you haven’t touched – is free of spelling errors, typos or other problems. Also make sure that the content is compelling for visitors.

2. Open your site in Google Chrome and press F12 and then open the “Network” tab to see your site’s speed and page sizes.

3. Test drive the forms on your site to make sure they work properly.

Web Development:

4. Verify that your site links are correct when they have transferred from the test site to your live site. If you have any 404 pages, develop a custom page with search to encourage visitors to go to other parts of your site. If pages are moved or have a new URL structure, make sure to use a 301 redirect.

5. Validate your W3C code and fix any errors you might have.

6. Add custom Favicons to your address bars or the tabs of users’ browsers to create a custom feel for your site.

7. Minify your site to compress the code and make it load faster.

Web Design

8. Cross-check your site on different browsers to ensure multi-browser compatibility.

9. Check that your display text is coming up when you hover over an image. You should also make sure that your images aren’t too large and that you don’t have issues with fonts not rendering correctly.

Search Engine Optimization

10. Make sure that all pages have title tags and meta tags.

11. Upload an accurate site map in both XML and HTML to make your site easier to navigate for users and search engines.

12. Have your Google Analytics package ready to go along with your Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. Also contact your ad rep if you have any PPC campaigns running to avoid a disruption.

13. Submit your site to the popular search engines to ensure they are indexed immediately.

14. Check to make sure that your SERP display is correct and your pages are displaying properly on search engine result pages.

15. Make sure that your social media buttons go to the right pages and allow people to “Like” the right parts of your site.

Network Administration:

16. Install site monitors to ensure visitors can get to your pages and use enhanced monitors for your key landing pages.

17. Run tests with load test software tools to simulate what will happen to your site in times of heavy traffic.

18. Have a backup system ready to go in case your site does crash.

19. Check password-protected pages to make sure people can’t get into them without the proper credentials.

20. If you have a secure certificate, check it to make sure it is valid on launch day.

Using SEO tactics to get customers to your website is great. After all, people need to find your site in order to use it. Companies know this – it’s why many spend significant amounts of time and resources on professional search engine marketing. However, getting people to visit your site is only part of the battle. If the content is weak or poorly written, or the layout is distracting and confusing, what is the point?

It’s easy for a web development consultant to spend so too much time worrying about SEO considerations and not enough thinking about customer usability; this often leads to websites that rank highly with search engines but have low conversion rates when it comes to translating web views into actual sales.

Don’t fall victim to this short-sighted approach to web development services. Instead, utilize these five tricks that will help boost your search engine rankings while also improving the interface and user experience for your customers:

Know Your Customer: There’s no such thing as the “typical” customer. But by doing some market research. you can understand what drives a potential customer in your category to make a purchasing decision. Remember that a website that works for one type of business might not be appropriate for another business.

Make Your Content Have a Point: The content on your website isn’t just there to fill space or serve as filler between optimized keywords. Think about the types of questions that you customers might have and design your text to clearly answer these questions.

Keep Graphics Simple and Clean: It’s easy to try and go overboard with graphics, colors and other design elements with laying out your website. After all, you want your site to be memorable and eye-catching. But in many cases, this means that your website will also be distracting and keep people from finding the links and information they need to make a purchasing decision.

Make Navigation Easy to Follow: One of the main reasons that people leave a website before making a purchase is because of poorly development site navigation. If they can’t easily find a link to the information they need, they’ll likely leave and try out a competitors’ site. Check your website design and make sure that customers can quickly get to the pages that lead to sales.

Track and Change: The work isn’t done when your website goes live. You need to track visitors, clickthrough rates and sales to determine what does and doesn’t work and make changes quickly if necessary.

One of the most difficult parts of a website optimization campaign is analytics. With many data points to choose from when looking at your landing page optimization campaign, it’s easy to overlook some of the most important elements. Here are six analytic points you need to pay attention to:

Entry Pages: A lot of emphasis is placed on home pages in website analytics. But landing pages and product pages are also critical to the success of your site. One of the best things to analyze on an entry page is the last action a person took before leaving. It might tell you what was frustrating on the site and caused them to quit.

Meeting Sales Goals: The main goal of almost any website optimization campaign is to increase landing page conversion and turn clicks into sales. But too many people get bogged down in the minute details of their web campaign and lose focus on tracking their sales performance. Most solid analytics tools have the ability to set and track eCommerce goals.

Web Form Stats: Your web forms are critical to your landing page conversion rate. Whether its customers asking for more information on your services or a shopping cart or payment page to complete a transaction, you need to know if customers are filling out forms once they get to the final step in the process.

Search Keywords: Finding the right keywords to focus your optimization efforts is a critical aspect of your SEO campaign. Before you do this, you’ll want to see how people are finding your site now. If the majority of customers found it by searching for your “brand name,” you aren’t doing enough to attract new customers. More generic keywords will be effective search keywords to optimize.

Traffic Sources: It’s easy to become so wrapped up in detailed web analytics and forget about one of the most basic pieces of data: where your web traffic is coming from. Determining if visitors are coming because of web searches, referrals or ad campaigns will help you understand which tactics can potentially have the best results.

Actual Website Traffic: Did you know that many website visits aren’t from real customers but from search engine robots and spiders that crawl Internet sites regularly? Most web visits that last 10 seconds or less are useless to you. Focus on lengthier visits to get a more accurate reflection of your web campaign.