Chad Hetherington

A landing page or lead magnet page are synonymous terms. It’s the page that potential customers descend upon after clicking on a search engine-optimized result, like an online ad.

These pages are what ultimately help us convert visitors into customers and customers into recurring patrons. But a plain Jane, unintuitive landing page might be doing you more harm than good. Luckily, there are a myriad of tools and techniques to measure and improve your landing page UX.

Therefore, a little somethin’ somethin’ called landing page experience should be your top priority.

What is a Landing Page Experience?

Landing page experience is quite literally what it sounds like — it’s a measure of how your landing page, or pages, are experienced (or predicted to be experienced) by visitors. This metric strives to discover just how useful and relevant your landing page will be to the people who’ve touched down on your website, likely by clicking on an ad.

The higher your landing page experience ranking, the better.

Here’s how Google illustrates the landing page experience:

“The landing page experience status describes whether your landing page is likely to provide a good experience to customers who click your ad and land on your website.”

Why Does Landing Page Experience Matter?

In an increasingly digital world, most of which is crowded with less-than-enchanting destinations, the importance of your landing page experience cannot be overstated. After all, it is the place where, if done correctly, you will influence more conversions — whether that be sales or sign-ups.

But in addition to encouraging more purchases and engagements, your landing page experience also affects a number of other important things about your overall performance on Google (and other search engines).

By optimizing your landing pages for a better overall experience, you stand to gain these other great benefits:

  • Decreased bounce rate.
  • Improved ad position.
  • Improved ad quality score.
  • Increased links and authority.

Still, landing pages offer even more perks for your content marketing strategy, such as:

  • Making a memorable introduction to newcomers.
  • Harvesting valuable insights and data.
  • Pushing visitors through the sales funnel.

And a lot more! Well, 9 more, actually. We even made an infographic about it.

Before we dive into specifics about optimizing your landing pages, know these things: landing page experience is important, and curating a good encounter for website visitors will help you increase conversions.

How Is Landing Page Experience Measured?

In Google Ads, the status of your landing pages is measured against other landing pages that are floating out there on a metaphorical, digital rock and ranking for the same keyword. When checking the grade of your page, it’ll either be:

  • Above average.
  • Average.
  • Below average.

It’s a pretty straightforward ranking system, and we’re here for it.

Here’s what Google has to say about landing page status:

  • An „average“ or „above average“ status means that there are no major problems with this keyword’s landing page experience when compared to all other keywords across Google Ads.
  • A „below average“ status means that you might want to consider some changes to improve your website’s landing page.

Below average = room for improvement. Got it. But how exactly do you tackle your landing pages that are rated poorly? Stay tuned — we’re almost there. Before we dig into that information, let’s chat briefly about landing page experience and how it relates to SEO.

Landing Page Experience and SEO

Landing pages are often a momentary asset. Because of that, a lot of people assume that landing page SEO is a futile effort. Those people couldn’t be more wrong. Along with optimizing your landing pages for a great user experience, optimizing for search engines is still a good idea.

After all, what good is a landing page if it isn’t found? Landing pages often act as a portal for newcomers who might be interacting with your business for the first time, so organic reach is never a bad thing, and it’s certainly still worth optimizing for here.

Tips to Achieve a Good Landing Page Experience

A good landing page experience is not won, it’s achieved. The good thing about that is there are actionable steps that you can take to improve your landing page experience for your visitors.

According to Google, it all boils down to these things:

  • Relevancy.
  • Trustworthiness.
  • Ease of use.
  • Reliability.

But just knowing these factors isn’t enough to enable anyone to up their landing page experience game. You need to understand how to become relevant, trustworthy and reliable, and what constitutes a page that’s easy for visitors to navigate. So let’s talk about all of that!

If you’ve been grinding out research on Google Ads and landing page experience and/or landing page optimization — halt. We’re here to help by synthesizing some of the best information out there, all in one place.

For Relevancy…

Be Consistent With Your Value Proposition and Call to Action

Ad relevance is key. If your ads say one thing, make sure that it’s consistent with your landing page and CTAs (Google gives the example of free shipping as a value prop). An irrelevant value prop is essentially clickbait and turns people away from your business. 

Use the Same Keywords on Both Your Ads and the Landing Page

If there’s one thing a content agency like Brafton knows, it’s keywords. The keywords you’re targeting and trying to rank for should be relevant across your ads and landing pages. One of the best ways to make these things cohere is to use the same keywords.

Sync Up Those CTAs

No matter the phraseology you use for your ad CTAs, make sure it’s the same on the landing page. Google mentions that, in doing this, you’ll be reinforcing your message and encouraging visitors to complete that action.

For Trustworthiness…

Write Quality Copy, Making Sure It’s Grammatically Correct

It’s hard to trust someone who sounds like they haven’t a clue what they’re talking about. It’s the same for a landing page. Quality copy — and original content in general — goes a long way. By making the text on your landing pages accessible and easy to read/understand, you gain a lot of trust points with visitors.

Fact Check Yourself Before You, In Fact, Wreck Yourself (or Your Landing Page)

There might not be a quicker way to discredit yourself than by sharing or endorsing incorrect statistics and information. If part of your landing page includes data that can either be wrong or right, and accuracy is important (as it always is), then you need to fact check. The more accurate your stats, the more trustworthy you become.

Display Reviews and Testimonials

Here’s one that’s relatively easy, given that you already have some satisfied customers: Include reviews and testimonials on your landing pages to instantly become more trustworthy. If you haven’t received any, don’t be afraid to connect with a few of your customers and ask for their feedback.

For Ease of Use…

Make the CTA Button Big and Clear

If you’re asking your visitors to complete an action, make that action clear. How do they initiate the purchase process or sign up for a newsletter? An unambiguous, clear CTA button can help make these actions easier. Avoid making them ridiculously big, though — just enough to be evident and tasteful.

Avoid Walls of Text

Walls of copy are exhausting just to look at, let alone read through. Make your page easy to read and, therefore, easier to use by breaking up text in a way that makes it more digestible. Using big and bold subheadings to divide copy, bulleted lists to synthesize information and even graphics instead of words to convey a message when possible are all great places to start.

Give the People What They Want

It can be pretty… infuriating when you click on an ad only for it to deliver you to a page that’s so ambiguous that you have no idea what it’s trying to communicate — or if what’s being communicated is nothing like what the ad inferred. If people click on your ad, they want to know more about whatever it’s promoting — so show that to them.

For Reliability…

Be Consistent

Consistency is important across a number of different optimization avenues. But when it comes to reliability, we’re talking about things like brand cohesion with your landing page and consistent experiences for your visitors no matter where they’re browsing from. A reliable landing page should be optimized for desktop and mobile.

Optimize Assets to Shorten Load Times

One of the most important aspects of webpage reliability, both to the visitor and to Google’s ominous algorithms, is load times — or page speed. To put it simply, the shorter, the better. Things like images, which are often integral to landing pages, need to be optimized so as not to drag out load times longer than necessary. Your visitors will be happy that they can access information quickly, and so will Google.

Be Knowledgeable and Friendly in Your Copy

We’ve talked about the actual copy on the landing page a couple of times now. That’s because a large chunk of what makes up a landing page is text. But what makes a reliable copy? Knowledgeable, friendly and easy-to-read content. So make sure your pages have that!

If you want to run a few tests on your own landing pages to see how they’re shaping up against the competition, or simply learn more, check out Google’s guide.

To Wrap Things Up

Now that you know what landing page experience is, how it can affect conversion and what you can do to optimize for it — we hope that you can change yours for the better. Feeling like that’s a laborious task? It certainly can be, which is why we have landing page experts, SEO services and content writers at the ready to help you give your visitors a better experience.

Curious about what else we can do for you and your business? Reach out for a chat.