10 ways to improve the conversion rate of your landing pages

© Digital Gearbox DigitalGearbox.co.uk
10 Quick & Easy Ways to Improve the
Conversion Rate of Your Landing Pages
Dear Website Owner,
If you’ve downloaded this e-book then I’m guessing like a lot of business owners we talk to
you are either frustrated by the poor performance of your current website, or looking to grow
through the power of online marketing.
The sad and shocking fact is that most businesses that choose to pay for traffic with Google
Adwords end up wasting a HUGE amount of money, time and effort sending the traffic to
poorly performing pages on their website.
This results in the businessbeing negatively impacted in the
following ways
1. High bounce rates on their pages caused by visitors seeing little or no value to help
them solve their problems. In many cases as high as 90% is not uncommon!
2. Poor Adwords quality scores from Google as the page performs badly resulting in a
significantly higher cost per click, costing the business thousands of pounds.
3. A very poor customer experience resulting in 97% of visitors never returning to your
website and never purchasing from you.
4. The risk of negative comments on social media. Let’s be honest, if a visitor feels your
site promised to help them with their problem and the page they landed on didn’t
deliver on that promise they can, and will share their frustrations out on Social Media.
These comments damage your business brand and stop potential customers visiting
your pages or trying your products.
5. You become more frustrated as you spend money on Adwords and see little return,
or worse you lose money resulting in your confidence being knocked about the ability
of online marketing to bring you new customers and sales.
But there is some good news – you can fix all of the above with the simple and quick to
implement steps we will walk you through in this e-book!
As a result, in just a few short months from now you could be seeing a huge upturn in the
number of leads and customers you see coming into your business, resulting in more sales
and profits from the money you are investing in Google Adwords.
So with so much to gain from fixing your lading pages let’s get started with a reminder of
exactly what a landing page is and its main job in your marketing funnel.

Landing Pages
The job of a Landing Page is to persuade visitors to take the next step and engage with your
business by requesting some value or advice from you, usually by signing up to your email
list. (Just like you did to get this free e-book – hey we practice what we preach!)
Now let’s outline the top 10 actions you can take. These tips are based on our years of
experience in helping clients optimise their landing pages to improve the performance of
their Google Adwords adverts.
Whilst some of these have specific requirements for Google Adwords – all of them will
increase the conversion rate of your Landing Pages and drive more leads and more sales.
Let’s jump in!
Hugh Overend – Digital Marketing Expert at Digital Gearbox
1. Have a clear and compellingcall to action
A call to action (CTA) tells your visitors to do what you want them to do! Research has
shown that if you don’t include a CTA then your visitors to you site won’t work it out for
themselves – they’ll just click away to visit your competitors!
Effective Call to Actions include:
 Buy Now / Add to Basket
 Enter our Free Prize Draw
 Download your Free Gift Now
 Sign Up for Special Offers
 Save 20% on your First Order
They don’t have to be long and complicated, in fact they work much better when they are
short and to the point!
Now that you’re aware of Call to Actions you will see them everywhere you go – online and
offline – and people are considerably more likely to take action if they’re asked to.
Take a few moments to create 3 new call to actions for your landing pages to test:
1. ___________________________________________________________
2. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
3. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

OK now you have your clear and compelling call to actions let go to strategy number 2…
2. Clearly explain whatyou’re offering in exchange for an email
address
Most visitors to your website won’t give you their email address (it’s personal information
after all) unless you’re VERY clear about exactly what VALUE they’re going to get in return.
How do you make this clear and maximise your conversions?
The good news is all you’ll really need is a couple of paragraphs of text, and some bullet
points with clear compelling reasons for the visitor.
We recommend you include (at minimum):
 A headline, clearly stating the offer
o “Sign up to our email newsletter and get this eBook free”
 A paragraph (or two) of text explaining what they’ll get in more detail
o “We love our email subscribers so we promise not to bombard you and only
send you quality updates full of useful and interesting things.
o “This eBook is the perfect quick read to get you the information you need to
start your journey towards widget excellence. It’s going to save you hours of
research, and fast track the widget project you’re working on.”
 A set of bullet points evangelising about the offer, keep them short and to the point
and aim for between 3-5 words
o “Save 10+ hours of research”
o “Everything you need to start your widget journey”
o “Written by our world class experts”
o “Totally free”
o “Available immediately”
Often on a landing page less is more – so don’t be afraid to keep it short!
Top Tip: This messaging should appear as text on the webpage (not an image with writing
on it) because Google Adwords will look at this text and use to calculate your Quality Score.
This is vital, because the better your Quality Score, the more traffic you’ll get for your budget
and the more leads and sales you can make to drive up your return on investment.
Which is what you want after all! 
This next tip may not be what you are expecting to see…

3. Clearly explaining whatyou’re NOT offering them for their
email address
People tend to be protective of their email address, so it’s good practice to reassure them
that you’re not going to misuse it. So this strategy, while simple, is VERY important to high
opt-in rates…
For example:
“We will:
 “Never sell, give, or barter your email address away to anyone else”
 “Never send you emails about some bright shiny new pointless widget”
 “Never fill your inbox with trash or otherwise disrespect you”
 “Allow you to unsubscribe at anytime”
Take a few minutes now to check your landing pages and make sure you are doing
everything you can to reduce the fear people have that you will SPAM them if they give you
their e-mail address.
Next is something we see far too often and it costs businesses loads of traffic and sales…
4. Avoid dead-endpagesthat go nowhere and have no
navigation
Whilst removing some of the navigational clutter from a page will improve the conversion
rate of your Landing Page, (we’ve see it double a client’s opt-ins), removing all your links
confuses customers and will annoy or flat out stop Google sending you traffic at all! Plus
your Adwords account could be shut down as a result, costing you time, money and traffic to
while you re-set up.
Often, visitors to your landing pages will be hearing about you and your business for the first
time. That means you need to build some TRUST with them before you can persuade them
to sign up. A dead end page will work against this because:
 Visitors don’t like landing on a dead end page, and who trusts things they don’t like?
 For many people the more they know about you the more they’ll trust you, and if
they can’t click into other areas of your website it’s very hard for them to find out
about you and what you can offer them.
Top Tip: It’s always best practice to link to your Privacy Policy whenever you’re collecting
data as Google like to see this on the footer of every page as again it builds trust and
confidence.
The next step is along the same theme, but more common than you would believe…

5. Avoid dead end websites AT ALL COSTS!
Dead end websites are even worse – so put your landing page on your proper website!
Google will assess whether or not the whole website contains “Valuable content” or not, as
will your visitors.
Plus, if Google thinks the only reason your website exists is to harvest data you’ll be heavily
penalised. Worse, you could have your adverts suspended or in many cases your account
closed all together!
Top Tip: Don’t look like a prize draw website and have some real information of VALUE on
your website that includes your contact details and phone number. Some customers like to
talk to a real person!
BONUS TIP!Google also dislikes sites that appear to be selling “get rich quick” schemes –
and a surprising number of legitimate sites get tarred with this brush too.
Remember better to be safe than battle the might of Google, so if in doubt don’t put the page
or website up as it can damage your brand and reputation.
6. Avoid pop ups on your LandingPages
Now we’re not suggesting you turn off all your popups, in fact they’re great at getting
engagement from causal visitors to your website who may not opt-in into your e-mail offer.
We’re recommending you turn off pop ups on the Landing Pages which you’re actively
driving traffic to.
When Google detects the popups on the Landing Page they’ll TURN OFF YOUR ADS –
which is a pretty definitive reason to turn off the pop ups. After all, you’ve paid for that traffic.
Consider the experience of the customer. They’ve clicked on an ad/social media share/blog
post etc. that’s driven them to your Landing Page to sign up. They’re on a page where they

can sign up, all the info is there, the sign up box and button are there; they don’t need
anything else, and then BAM - pop up time!
This is a bad enough user experience (UX) for the offer they were looking at, but even worse
if you’re showing them something else.
We suggest you put an exit pop up on other pages of your site people can visit after your
landing page like your “Home” page or the “About Us” pages that tend to get a lot of visits.
Next is one that may seem a little controversial…
7. ONLY ask for email address… nottheir name or phone
number.
Why?
Well the less information you ask for, the more sign ups you will get. Experience and data
proves this point over and over again.
This strategy is worth repeating:
The less information you ask for, the more sign ups you will get.
So only ask for the customer’s email address!
Top Tip: While you’ll get more sign ups asking for less, you will inevitably get less interested
leads. Sometimes it’s worth having a very complex sign up form to discourage tyre-kickers,
however it really depends on what kind of business you are.
As with so much of marketing online we suggest you test and measure to see what works
best for your target market and niche. With a little experimentation you’ll soon find the sweet
spot between quality and quantity.
8. Incrediblyobviousthings you should avoid if you want to
have Google Adwordstraffic coming to your website…
Whilst this may seem really obvious, sometimes it’s the most obvious things that we miss…
 Don’t sell free/government services (Yes people still try this scam!)

 Don’t let your site be infected with Malware etc. (WordPress sites are vulnerable to
this)
 Do not disable the back button as it REALLY annoys visitors and again impacts your
quality score.
 Don’t use “Hype” and big unbelievable promises of magic results like – “Lose 3 stone
in 7 days” type of copy as Google is on a mission to rid the internet of this type of
site.
9. Offer somethingUnique and Specific to solve your visitors
Problem
Yes, there is a lot of competition out there but offering the same download as all your
competitors is not as powerful as creating something unique of your own.
So if everyone else is doing “8 reasons you should BUY our product”, then why not do “7
Ways you can SOLVE <Key Problem> with our Product”.
Spend some time looking into the longer keywords visitors use to find your website and see
if there is a Free product or Lead Magnet you could create just for them.
If it’s something the customer hasn’t seen before then they’ll be that bit more likely to sign up
with you, as long as the promise is specific to their problem.
It goes without saying that the content you supply after they opt-in needs to deliver on that
promise. We hope you feel this e-book is doing just that! 
OK, we are almost at landing page strategy number 10… well done for reading this far!
10. Have a bespokeSuccessPage for each Landing Page offer.
Whilst in itself this won’t always increase your sign ups, it will give them a better experience,
AND give you more useful stats to use to optimise the activity.
What is a Success Page?
A success page is where the visitor lands after entering their details.
With a bespoke success page you can immediately give the person who’s signed up access
to the reward you were offering – which will make them happy!
You can also use this page to help them towards the next step of their journey with you:
 Ask for extra information about them so you can give them more personal and
relevant communications
 Recommend the next step in their journey with you. This might be to book a meeting
or even buy a product... perhaps give them a One Time Offer to upsell them. This
can work REALLY well especially if the product you’re selling is less than £10 and
can be digitally delivered.

When you signed up for this eBook on our website you’ll have gone to a landing page that
enabled you to download the eBook and which recommended you sign up for one of our free
clinics – which we hope you took up!
If you didn’t, then Click Here now to book your free Adwords Clinic
The other great thing about individual success pages is that you can measure the
performance of your Landing Pages and the marketing that drives people there.
Each sign up can be captured in Google Analytics and Google Adwords – so you can see:
 How many of those who got to the landing page signed up (your conversion rate)
 Which keywords drove the best conversion rate
 Which adverts drove the best conversion rate
This data is essential to getting you more of the quality traffic that will sign up to your email
list – and (more to the point) get you more bang for your buck!
We recommend putting in place both the Analytics and the Adwords tracking – as this
enables you to maximise the speed at which your Adwords activity can be optimised.
The Next Step
So what's next?
1. Go away and implement the changes we outlined here and see your landing pages
significantly improve their performance, whatever you do this is a MUST!
2. If you’ve found this e-book of value then perhaps you should claim a Free Google
Adwords Review with one of our Digital Experts – Click Here now to book this as
we have a limited number available each month.
3. You know a business owner who has a website that needs more traffic and leads? If
you do why not forward this report to them so they can improve their landing pages
as well.
Whatever you decide we look forward to supporting your business and helping to
Drive Traffic, Drive Sales and Drive Growth.
PS – If you’ve just skimmed this content be sure to go back and implement the 10 strategies
as they will make a huge difference to your landing pages! Click Here for your free Adwords
Audit.

10 ways to improve the conversion rate of your landing pages

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10 ways to improve the conversion rate of your landing pages