Do you really need to spend time making your landing pages better?

As marketers, we can sometimes be guilty of focusing on the immediate – the latest campaign, SEO tweaks, or the latest piece of content to support our marketing strategy. We can spend a lot of energy (and sometimes money) on acquisition, but then overlook the landing page experience. 

The landing page is a crucial part of the customer journey, and could be the difference between a conversion and someone bouncing off your site. Quite simply, the landing page is the first page that your customer lands on after a search, when clicking on an advert, or a link in a social media post or email newsletter. It is the first real opportunity you get as a business to present your brand, and showcase your product or service in an environment you completely control. So why do we overlook it, and does it really matter?

It’s true that creating landing pages costs time and money, and will need to be updated over time. In reality though, those points are true of any marketing investment. Everything has a shelf life, but that doesn't mean you shouldn’t do it. The more you invest upfront, the longer the page will stay relevant, but you should always be evaluating the data, and making incremental changes in response to customer feedback anyway. 

Beyond providing a better user experience, there are many compelling business reasons to spend the time ensuring your landing page is as polished as possible. 

Increased conversion rate

By investing the time to get your landing page in top shape, you’re increasing the likelihood of your audience converting – whether that be signing up to a newsletter, making a purchase or reaching out to learn more about your product or service. You should try to create a landing page that clearly addresses the customer pain points, and has an obvious call to action that’s easy to find, understand, and complete. 

A higher quality score in Google Ads

If you're using Google Ads, your landing page's quality has a direct impact on your Quality Score. A higher Quality Score can result in lower costs per click (CPC), better ad positioning, and overall, a higher return on investment. This means you’ll be attracting more customers at a lower price point – which is always a win!

A/B testing

We always say that marketing isn’t a one-and-done affair; you should always be tweaking and iterating your campaigns based on the data available. Spending the time to run A/B testing on your landing pages is a great way to gather more data about your audience’s behaviour, and what they respond to better. This can lead to significantly improved marketing performance over time as you invest that learning into other campaigns.

SEO benefits

Don’t make the mistake of thinking your landing page is separate from your wider SEO strategy, as it can actually have a huge impact. Optimising your landing page with strong keywords, good page load speed and quality backlinks can elevate your whole website’s performance. More importantly though, it can adversely affect it if your landing page is poorly optimised, so you really need to get the balance right. Your bounce rate will also impact your SEO, but if people are bouncing off your landing page then it’s failing to convert, and needs improvement anyway.

Having a strong landing page is an important part of any marketing strategy, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of other important elements. Much like anything in life, it is about finding the right balance, and making the correct decisions based on the data available, and objectives of your campaign.

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