Your customers are fickle and they’re smart and together this is a very dangerous combination – if you make them do anything resembling work they’re going to lose interest (or their patience) and wonder over to the next website. They know there’s a whole internet out there full of identical products or services and all they have to is press that back button and they’re back in those search engine results pages with all your competitors to chose from and all that hard work to get that ranking goes down the drain.

If you’re going to spend time getting that organic ranking or money getting that paid ranking then you need to put twice the effort into making that landing page as sticky as possible. Drip the rest of your site about enticingly so they can’t help but take a peek at everything else you have to offer and before you know it they’re sucked in and handing over their hard earned cash.

In the picture below, you can see an eye-tracking heat map (simulation shown) revealing where a subject’s eyes alight on a landing page under test.

Don’t Waste Time Being Subtle

Your visitor needs to be able to see straight away what you’re offering and why it’s so amazing and worth sticking around for. Don’t waste time using elaborate text or using half a dozen words when one will do and don’t go out of your way to sound overly smart you’ll just end up sounding pretentious.

Don’t Distract Your Visitors

Whilst you’re trying not to come across as pretentious you also need to make sure there’s nothing else distracting your visitors from your products or services. If you’ve got flashy banners or ad sense dominating above the fold of your landing page you’re just leaving an enticing little breadcrumb trail to distract them or you’re just going to end up looking so spammy they’re not even going to look at anything else on your site.

Show Off Your USP

Whatever it is that puts you above your competitors needs to be clearly on display, we’ve already talked about how fickle your visitors can be and if they’ve done their research you need to be offering more than just the product. If it’s cheaper or you offer better delivery terms or maybe you just have amazing customer service, whatever it is it needs to be front and center for everyone to see.

Colouring

It might sound basic but the colours you’re using are essential, if they’re too over the top your traffic is going to leave before they get a headache and dark gray on a light gray backing is going to be hard to read (not to mention dull). Black and white might be boring but if you want to try something different make sure it’s easy enough to read without being off putting.

Make The Conversion Path Easy

Another characteristic of your traffic is they’re going to be lazy, they don’t want a half an hour game of hunt the shopping cart or have to enter the captcha a dozen times because it’s so sensitive or hard to read. Show them what they want, tell them why they want it and make it as easy as possible for them to get it.

Jessica is currently working on the SEO for Schofields who provide French insurance for holiday homes