The quality of your landing pages is vitally important to any digital marketing campaign. Even small changes to your web page content can increase your online conversions, whilst Google’s search engine algorithm specifically evaluates your landing pages based on the quality of their content – so high-quality on-site content can directly increase your Google rankings.
The goal for your site’s content has to be user engagement! How you get the users who click-through to your web pages to engage with your site and remain interested and attentive to your content, will directly affect both your conversion rates and your organic rankings – providing users with a better conversion experience is so important!
There are several highly effective strategies for improving user engagement on your site. The most fundamental strategy, and definitely the first place to start, is reviewing the format of your existing content.
Any SEO-minded person knows having the search terms you’re optimising to recur throughout your content is key for improving rankings: if you’re targeting page one of results for ‘Novelty Mugs For Sale’, the more often ‘Novelty Mugs For Sale’ appears in your on-site content the better, right?
Not necessarily!
Including the key search term is vital, but simply stuffing your content full of it can actually harm your rankings. Google focuses on the user engagement value of your prose; keywords should read well and be appropriately spaced within your content – not dusted conspicuously throughout, especially where they cause sentence structure to deteriorate. If your content doesn’t read well, it doesn’t rank well.
To improve the user engagement experience of your visitors, you should rewrite your content to be clear, concise, current and connected.
Clear
Clarity in your message is crucial. You know what the conversion goal of your page is: if it’s to sell novelty mugs, make sure the focus of your content is novelty mugs and why to purchase them. This seems obvious, but often landing page content strays from the cause, mentioning extraneous details about the company, other available products etcetera, making the central message far less clear. Ensure that your conversion goal is the sole focus of your content, and if you have a unique selling point, make sure this important differentiating factor is made crystal clear and is the central focus of your page, don’t hide it away in a subordinate clause somewhere.
Concise
Brevity is key. That said, there’s no need to reduce your content to only few sentences. In fact, you can find out what the optimal length of your on-site content is from any SEO expert. Rather, you should ensure that your words are to-the-point. Clarity and brevity go hand-in-hand, each will significantly improve user engagement; the majority of online shoppers are impatient; if a user is interested in your product, can easily determine that what they’re reading is about that product and doesn’t take half an hour to read, their attentiveness and engagement will be higher, they will be more likely to convert and the value Google gives your page will be higher too.
Current
Ensuring that you frequently update your content to be relevant to current events and trends is vital. For example: If you set up an e-commerce website selling iPhone cases in 2007 (when the first iPhone was released) and haven’t updated your main body of landing page content following the release of the subsequent seven iPhone variations – even if you sell the recent iPhone 5s cases, this won’t be clear in your content and users may look elsewhere for the product. What’s more, fresh content is ranked well by Google, factors like how often you update your content can improve your page’s ranking. Keeping your content up-to-date is important for your user engagement value and organic ranking – it’s time-consuming but absolutely worth it.
Connected
Always make sure that the subject of the landing page content is directly connected to the content on the link or ad that the user clicked-through from.
If a user clicks on an organic result, or a paid ad, for your website titled ‘Novelty Mugs For Sale’ and reaches a landing page focused on a special offer for some other product that your company offers, that user is unlikely to stay very long, and even more unlikely to purchase anything. Having misleading set-ups like this on your site will cause your Bounce Rate to skyrocket and your conversions and returning visitor statistics to fall, often dramatically. Make sure your site’s message matches the message of your ads and page titles.
If you make these simple changes to your landing pages’ content, you can expect an improvement in user engagement, which will subsequently improve your conversion rates and your pages’ organic rankings. It isn’t the full package, but it is a great place to start!
If you’d like any assistance in optimising and maintaining your on-site content, learning about alternative and more effective strategies for improving user engagement, or having an SEO audit to determine the key areas in need of attention on your website, our team of digital marketing experts at The Click Hub are always happy to help.