Whether you’re talking about a landing page or a website, the first consideration when optimizing a website is to take it one page at a time.
When you examine a single page of your website, you can carefully evaluate search engine optimization factors like titles, content and meta tags. You can scrutinize your content to ensure that it addresses all of your customers’ questions. You can inspect the design and evaluate whether the page has the optimal eye path.
Most importantly, a critical factor in optimizing your website is to have a single goal for each individual web page or landing page. Just one — no more. Many marketers and designers make the mistake of trying to do too much on a page. A page, however, should do one thing well rather than distract users with multiple themes.
One example of maintaining a singular focus on a page is removing the site navigation in checkout. You’ll notice that on MaroonHelmet.com and 3FellersBakery.com, two clients of ours, there is no site navigation on any checkout screen. We deliberately did this to keep visitors focused on the task at hand, which in this case was buying products.
Focusing on one goal per page is an idea that has been reinforce time and time again through research. The latest research (May 2007) from Marketing Experiments found that “Focusing the landing page on the primary objective increased conversion by more than 19%.” The same study found that “by clarifying the offer and providing only one call-to-action option (button), conversion increased by 65%.”
Optimizing your website should be a page-by-page process, and all content, illustrations, photos, etc. should directly support the one goal for that page. It’s this continual analysis and improvement that will keep your website running at peak effectiveness.
