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Online marketing is all about giving value to receive value.
You want your target audience to purchase your gardening supplies from your landing page? Provide them with a buying guide and gardening tips through your content.
Need subscribers for your web design newsletter? Perhaps a gallery of free website templates will help you earn their trust.
We can go on and on about how providing value to your target audience is necessary if you want to convert them into leads or paying customers.
The only problem is that visitors don’t always take the bait.
It doesn’t matter if your website gets hundreds or thousands of traffic each month. If your online presence is not helping you close more sales, then there’s probably something amiss in your lead generation and conversion strategies.
In this post, we’ve put together the top four reasons why your visitors aren’t converting.
Let’s get started.
1. Your Landing Page Doesn’t Have a Clear Goal
From a marketing standpoint, web pages can be seen as tools that can help you (and your audience) accomplish something.
Unless you understand what your website is built for, it’ll be tricky to identify which elements must and mustn’t be added to the page.
With that in mind, landing page design must always start with effective goal setting.
For instance, if your goal is to get users to subscribe to your mailing list, you need to have a straightforward approach. Ask yourself, “What page elements do I need to use to accomplish what I want?”
Brian Dean of Backlinko probably asked the same question at one point. As such, he settled for a clear headline, a well-defined value proposition, and a simple opt-in form:
Of course, this is just an example of what a goal-oriented page must look like.
Just remember that landing page elements must lead users into taking a specific action — not serve as distractions to the conversion process.
2. Their Expectations Aren’t Met
Even with a landing page that’s optimized from top to bottom for conversions, visitors will still not convert if their expectations aren’t met.
This is usually the result if you use the wrong keywords in your strategy.
For example, let’s say you have an affiliate page that reviews web hosting companies. If a visitor arrives through a link with the anchor text “WordPress website development,” chances are they aren’t looking for what your content has to offer.
It’s all about understanding the user intent behind every keyword you use in your campaign. Regardless if you’re running a PPC ad or building links for SEO — you need to target keywords that are used by people who are more likely to take action.
To find these keywords, a simple strategy is to use Ubersuggest to look for long-tail keyword suggestions. Once the results are in, add some filters to scrape ideas that include commercial-based terms, like “hire,” “services,” and so on:
Another way to set your target audience’s expectations straight from the get-go is to optimize your website’s metadata, namely the page title and meta description. For WordPress users, you can use a plugin like Yoast SEO to edit them from a single location:
3. The “Hourglass Syndrome”
Sometimes, the reason why your visitors aren’t converting isn’t complicated at all — they probably got tired of waiting for your website to load and left.
As absurd as it sounds, this is proven by several studies.
A recent one came from Google, which concluded that 53% of mobile users would leave a website if it loads for more than 3 seconds. Another study by Kissmetrics, on the other hand, puts the abandonment rate for slow websites down to 40% on desktops.
Whether you’re worried about your mobile or desktop users, you’re still missing out on around half of your potential conversions if you don’t improve your website’s loading speed.
Don’t panic — there are easy fixes you can use to boost your WordPress site’s performance.
The first step you should take is to run an analysis on Google PageSpeed Insights.
In addition to a complete list of performance-related issues detected on your website, it’ll also provide you with a handful of “Optimization Suggestions” that can help you fix them:
If your website has high amounts of traffic and has a global reach, you can further improve your audience’s experience by using a CDN to improve your site’s security and loading speed. CDN stands for “Content Delivery Network.” It is a geographically distributed group of servers that can help deliver web content to a user, based on their location.
4. There’s Too Much Text
Apart from a slow loading speed, online users also get bored easily due to thick walls of text.
Let’s face it, while elaborate storytelling sometimes works; they often cause the engagement of visitors to burn out fast. This is usually the case for landing pages that are supposed to deliver quick value.
Remember, humans can be very impatient creatures. That’s why you need to make sure your value proposition, CTA, and other conversion elements are the first things your visitors see.
There are many ways for you to do this:
Incorporate Visual Content
A paragraph that explains the data and research behind your offer? You can summarize them all in one, well-made infographic.
Some of the tools you can use are:
- Piktochart
- Venngage
- Canva
Use Bullet Points
If you need to enumerate multiple points or takeaways, use bullet points or numbers to present them in an organized manner.
Don’t forget to maximize readability by using simple words and keeping sentences short.
Don’t Ask for Too Much Information
Finally, if you need to show users a registration form, avoid asking for information that’s not essential to your lead generation process. Not only will this make your page look too crowded, but it’ll also put off warm prospects who badly need the information you can provide.
Conclusion
Remember, with the next alternative brand only a few clicks away; online users always take any offer they come across with a grain of salt.
You need to make every visitor count if you want to secure your website’s profitability. And with the tips above, you should be able to do so with ease.
Think we missed an important landing page optimization strategy? We’d love to hear about them — leave a comment below and jump into the conversation!