6 Landing Page Best Practices for Your Local Business’ 2021 Ad Campaigns

It’s easy to build a landing page. But building a landing page optimized for increased marketing conversions and ROI? That’s hard—especially if you’re working on these landing pages for the first time.

As digital marketing campaigns and strategies evolve and adapt to new opportunities and trends, landing page best practices have also changed. While the basic tenets of successful landing pages have remained more or less intact, rising nuances of digital marketing—ranging from the rise of local SEO to the increased interconnectedness of multi-channel marketing campaigns—make it necessary to stay up-to-date on the latest best practices for not only landing page development, but digital marketing as a whole.

Looking for tips to improve your use of landing pages? Here are six strategies to consider.

1. Align Landing Page Messaging (and Branding) With Referral Ads

In many cases, landing pages are reached when a user clicks on an online ad or other content asset. Since landing pages follow these interactions, it’s important to make sure the messaging—as well as other branding elements such as logos and color schemes—is consistent with the content that drove the referral.

If you’re a local bank advertising driving customers to a landing page about your auto financing products, for example, the referring ad shouldn’t be so broad as to discuss lending products in general. Instead, it should be specific to consumers sorting through their auto financing options.

While a more specific ad may reduce the number of referrals coming to your landing page, it will increase the quality of this traffic, potentially reducing your landing page’s bounce rate while improving your conversion rate. A digital advertising partner can help coordinate and manage these connected ad campaigns to make sure this messaging is aligned with your landing page.

2. Employ Local SEO Best Practices

If you’re a local business, your landing pages need a local SEO emphasis. By optimizing landing pages for your business location, you can increase your landing page’s visibility in organic search, boost your Quality Score for paid search marketing, and help landing page traffic associate your business with its local presence.

Make sure location information, including mentions of the city or region you serve, are used in headings, metadata, and the body text of the landing page. This will optimize the page for SEO and improve its visibility in your company’s service area.

3. Emphasize Outcomes, Not Your Process

Landing pages are designed to speak to your customers’ needs and concerns. Since a landing page is intended to offer in-depth information and deeper engagement with prospects in the consideration phase, the content of that landing page needs to speak to the prospect’s goals with converting as a customer.

If your business offers streamlined local delivery services that beat both local and online retail rivals, for example, don’t get lost in the weeds explaining how you’re able to do this. Instead, emphasize the speed with which orders can reach your local customers. By speaking directly to these pain points, you can quickly demonstrate your value and potentially convert more customers.

4. Gear Each Landing Page Toward Your Intended CTA

Landing pages should be designed to deliver a single, well-defined call-to-action. From top to bottom of the landing page, don’t disrupt your own marketing strategy by mixing in multiple CTAs and forcing prospects to make a decision.

Whether you’re aiming for a purchase, a phone call, a filled form, or another CTA, choose a single CTA to eliminate the need for prospects to make a decision—which could lead to some of those prospects bouncing. By gearing the entire landing page toward this outcome, you’ll have a better shot at compelling prospects to take the next step.

5. Clear Out the Clutter

As part of your effort to keep customers focused and moving toward your CTA, landing pages should have a different design than a typical page of your website. Navigation links should be removed to avoid distractions. Similarly, external links should be excluded from a landing page to stop prospects from clicking through, leaving your landing page, and never coming back.

Citations of data can be included as footnotes that feature a URL with the hyperlink disabled. By removing these potential paths out of your landing page, you can focus prospects toward leaving this page via your CTA.

6. A/B Test to Optimize Outcomes

Consumer psychology is constantly changing. New technology teaches us new ways to process information, interact with brands, and even interpret branding, images, and other rich media assets. A/B testing is a proven method of testing individual elements of your landing page to see if a particular option drives a better result.

From branding to images to the messaging itself, A/B testing can improve landing page performance and increase ROI for this essential marketing asset. A digital advertising partner can take the lead on performing A/B testing and interpreting insights to guide changes to your marketing strategy.

Landing pages play a critical role in qualifying leads and winning over potential buyers during the research and consideration process. Make sure your time and resource investment is set up to maximize your company’s conversion opportunities. A digital advertising partner can help develop, build, and manage landing pages within your larger digital strategy. Contact Cox Media today to find out how we can help.