Landing pages are the first impression most visitors have of your website, but more than 20% of companies have no testing strategy for these pages. Sure, the pages might be so good that there’s no way to improve them, but let’s be honest—what are the chances of that?
Finding and taking advantage of the high traffic landing pages on your website can generate more leads, improve your conversions, and bring in more revenue with little extra effort. Let’s look at how you can find these pages on your site and what to do with them once you do.
What Does Website Traffic Mean?
“Traffic” is the term used to describe the visitors coming to your website. The more visitors you get, the higher your traffic numbers.
Website traffic can be more than human visitors, however. Search engines like Google have “crawlers” that scour the web looking for new pages to add to their index. These crawlers can register as traffic to your website, as do other “robots” that crawl the web looking for information.
Website analytics tools like Google Analytics can separate these automated visitors from real people to give you an accurate picture of your traffic. Keep in mind that there’s also a difference between visitors and page views.
One visitor might look at several pages on your site or even reload the same page more than once. This creates several page views but is still only a single visitor.
What is a Landing Page?
At its most basic level, a landing page is any page on your website where a visitor first “lands.” They could be coming from Google, one of your ads, a social media site, or a link from another website. Whatever the source, they’re going to end up on a particular page on your site first.
You could have pages on your site intended to be landing pages. If you’re running ads or social media campaigns, this is likely the case. The page that a visitor clicks through to should be designed to continue the conversation they have in their head from whatever source they’re coming from.
You can also have pages that were never intended to be a landing page but may rank well in Google for a popular search term or may have been linked to by a popular website. These are the pages that have the most potential for improvement since they may not have been written with conversions in mind.
How to Find High Traffic Pages on Your Website
To find the high traffic pages on your website, you should have an analytics tool installed on your website. There are lots of options to choose from but one of the most popular is Google Analytics (GA).
GA is a powerful suite of tools and like most of Google’s services, it’s free to use. It tracks the traffic on your website and will show you exactly which pages are getting the most traffic. You can set it up to track conversions, show you the path your visitors take through your site once they hit the first landing page, and even identify how quickly people leave your site.
You can also subscribe to and use SEO software, such as Ahrefs, SEMrush and SEO PowerSuite, which include tools for estimating traffic, clicks and other activity on your website, not only from Google, but from many other search engines and referral sources, to identify a broader range of traffic sources.
Once you know which pages are getting the most traffic, you can increase the advantage given to those pages by optimizing their performance.
Optimizing Your Landing Pages for Best Results
Website optimization is one of the highest ROI activities you can undertake. The visitors are already coming to your site so you don’t have to find a way to reach more people. You only have to find ways to convert more of the ones you’re already reaching.
Bounce Rate
One of the first things to look at is the bounce rate of the page. The bounce rate is how many visitors click away from your site, and how quickly, once they land on the page. A high bounce rate means the page is somehow not what they expected.
You can add content like images and video to the page to help engage your visitors or you can make changes to the layout to make it easier to read. Improving your bounce rate can also help improve your search engine rankings and lower your ad costs since Google and other networks know when a visitor clicks on your site and then immediately clicks back and chooses a different one.
Message-to-Market Match
Another way you can improve the conversions and “stickiness” of your landing pages is by finding a better message-to-market match. If the content on the landing page doesn’t address the visitor’s need, it can raise your bounce rate.
Tools like Google Analytics will help you see where the visitors are coming from. You can reverse engineer this information and improve the content on your landing page to better match what they’re looking for.
Conversion Optimization
If the goal of your landing page is to convert the visitor in some way (and it always should be), that’s another area to focus on. Improving your conversion rate can be more valuable than more visitors in many cases.
If you get 500 visitors to one of your landing pages and that page converts at 1% you’re going to convert 5 people. If the same page only gets 50 visitors but converts at 20% you’ll convert 10 people.
When you can get the page converting at 20% and then have 500 visitors land on it, you’ll have the best of both worlds.
Enhance the Performance of Your Highest Traffic Web Pages
The best way to take advantage of your high traffic landing pages will depend partly on what the intended purpose of the page was in the first place. If it’s a dedicated landing page that already has a lead capture or other conversion device on it, there’s not as much upside as a page that wasn’t intended as a landing page.
Content pages or blog posts often aren’t intended to be landing pages. If the page becomes popular, you can make some changes to improve its results. Add a lead capture form to collect your visitors’ contact information and get them on your email list. Or add some other type of call-to-action such as links to your products or services or links to follow you on social media.
Reduce Your Visitors’ Options
If the page wasn’t intended to be a landing page, one way you can improve the results is by reducing the number of options you give your visitors. For example, if it’s a blog post, try removing the sidebar, links to other posts, ads, and anything else that could take the visitor off the page.
Add a lead capture box or another conversion tool to the page if there isn’t already one there. This will help focus the visitors on your most-wanted action.
Update Your Landing Pages Regularly
Another effective way to keep your visitors engaged is to update your landing pages regularly. Add new information as it becomes available or update the existing content to reflect changes in your industry. Longer content can get better results in many cases as well, both with higher conversions and better search engine optimization.
If the content is evergreen, meaning it never goes out of date, you can still add new information or expand on what’s already there. The point is to show your visitors that the information is up-to-date, even if the page was originally written months or even years ago.
Redirect Visitors to Other Parts of Your Site
If you have other pages on your site that are already optimized for conversions, you can use your high traffic pages to direct visitors there. You can place links in the content or even place “ads” on the page that send people to other places on your site.
Depending on the content of the landing page, you could also set it up as a “map” to different pages on your site. Refer the visitors to different areas, depending on what they’re looking for. Some tools will do this automatically based on where the visitor came from or you can create a separate call-to-action section to help people find the information that is most helpful for their needs.
Don’t Let Your Website Traffic Go to Waste
The high traffic landing pages on your website are one of its most valuable assets. Those visitors ended up on your site because they thought it would solve a problem they have. Don’t let that traffic go to waste.
Provide them with information that will help them solve their problem. You don’t have to give everything away but offering them some helpful content for free is a good way to make a connection. When they need more information or want to pay someone to take care of the problem for them, they’re going to think of you first.
Take this article, for example. Hopefully, you have a better idea of how you can take advantage of the high traffic pages on your website after reading it. But you may not want to spend a lot of time learning how to do these things and putting them into action.
If you’d rather focus on what your business does best and leave the digital marketing and conversion optimization to the experts, Rawson Internet Marketing can help. We offer digital marketing services that can improve your online marketing and maximize your ROI. Get in touch today to find out what we can do for you.