Four Ways to Improve Your Landing Page
Like any sales or financial report, your website analytics is another tool every business owner should consider. One of the reports that you should be looking at, outside basic stats like sessions, bounce rate, and key phrases used to find your website, is the report that helps you determine your best-performing landing pages.
It looks like this when viewing it from Search Engine searches, meaning these are the pages that are most popular from basic searches:
You can see how the first three listings are pages are blog posts. I can see that, most likely, my homepage gets the most traffic while a blog post, ‘How Your Website Drives Your Marketing Strategy,’ and our portfolio. Then it’s my post on the latest changes to the Yoast plugin and a post on blogging, then 6th is the page about our web hosting services.
After this, I like to look at another set of landing page stats that shows me which pages and posts are getting ‘hits’ from all channels like referral pages, social media, or a direct link from a PDF or email, as well as searches.
If your website goals are falling flat, these are the stats you might want to look at. These pages can you tell what folks are most interested in learning more about. It can help drive your blogging strategy.
So let’s get to the reporting and what to look for on your landing page.
1. First, which landing page serves as a homepage?
2. Then, are the landing pages performing?
This is important to decide after you’ve identified which pages are your top ten pages or posts. Bounce rates and whether a goal was accomplished can help determine if a landing page needs some help. Some indicators include:
- bounce rate
- time spent on the page
- percentage of new visitors
- goal completion
3. Ask them how well your SEO campaign is working?
These numbers are key if you are specifically advertising on different websites or working on certain keyphrase sets. The landing page can tell you if either is working. For example, I can tell on my website that the phrase ‘houston web design’ is sending about 7% of my traffic while I have optimized my homepage for this phrase and worked hard on my blogs to send traffic to it. I’ve also included the phrase ‘web design firm’ in various websites that link back to me.
4. Finally, who or what is sending you traffic?
What is sending you traffic is just as important as who. The referral traffic from different websites and social media and email marketing can help you determine your landing page effectiveness while attached to a goal. For example, if you’re running a social media campaign, you’d expect to see more referral traffic from the social networks you use, like Facebook or Twitter. I can see the traffic from when I shared a blog post with fans. I can see the click-throughs to my landing pages and how long they stayed.
