Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Chris Hickman, Founder and CEO at Adficient, with 15 years of experience in search marketing and conversion optimization.

Landing pages are single web pages that aim to convince your visitor to join your mailing list, purchase your product, sign up for your free trial, watch an informative video, or whatever else you want them to do. Landing page optimization is the art of tweaking those landing pages so that they convert a higher percentage of visitors. If you’re an online business, each little tweak that pushes the conversion rate upward means more profits for you.

Here are some helpful tricks which could help you immensely if your landing pages aren’t performing as well as you’d like.

Mobile Friendly

Mobile phones are here to stay, and making your landing page mobile friendly is a great place to start improving conversions. Over half of all web searches are done with mobile devices now, so if your landing page isn’t optimized for mobile you could be missing out on significant conversion opportunities. Make sure your landing pages are responsive to avoid the waste of your search engine optimization efforts.

Give Your Landing Page a Single Purpose

Visitors should be greeted with a single call to action when they reach your landing page. Whether that call to action is to join the mailing list, watch a video, or sign up for a seminar, it should be the only call to action on the page.

When your customers have a lot of choices, their brain will freeze up on what the ‘best’ alternative is. This leads to analysis paralysis and they won’t choose anything, which means you lose the conversion. Don’t give them time to think by giving multiple choices, such as by showing a link to other parts of your website from your landing page.

Ease of Navigation

This goes hand in hand with having a single, easy to understand call to action. There should be no opportunity to go to a place where they will not be presented with your offer. It should be crystal clear as to what you want your audience to do.

If your landing page is a long-form sales letter or some other form of copy that requires scrolling, you must make sure that the conversion action is very obvious. Large buttons and clear signup forms are a must.

Call to Action

Speaking of your call to action, they must be very clear and concise. A bold button is the simplest, but if you’re trying to get information from a visitor then this presents a problem. The more information a form requires, the higher the chance of abandonment.

If your goal is to harvest demographic information, you may need to get that information in stages. For initial customers, an email address is enough, with maybe a first name. That’s enough to get a relationship started. As they progress further through your funnels, you can ask for more detailed information.

Keyword Your Page Title

As long as you’re not stuffing your keywords into every nook and cranny of your landing page, putting the keyword into the page title isn’t going to hurt in the least. This will not only help your readers and search engines discover you, but it will let them know what your page is about. In fact, e-commerce pages do a lot of this. Each product page ends up as a landing page.

Supercharge your landing page onpage optimization efforts with CanIRank seo software. Find out exactly what your competitors are doing to rank on the first page, along with SEO suggestions to improve your page. 
Speaking of keywords, be careful on a small landing page not to overstuff with your chosen keywords. The title, H1 tag, and the alt tags of your relevant images is all you really need for SEO purposes. As long as the rest of the copy reads in a natural way, you’re good for keywords.

Provide Proof of Legitimacy

While you don’t want to link people to other parts of your site, you do want them to know that they hit your branding and that you’re a legitimate business. Using logos or contact information on your landing page can help people overcome their nervousness from accepting your offer. Additionally, if your landing page takes sensitive information, getting security verification and using seals from companies like Verisign can also increase customer confidence about your legitimacy.

Have Good Copy

This may seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how much little copy tweaks can affect conversion rates. If you’ve got the other things in this list down pat, it’s time to look at the actual copy of your landing page (and maybe your PPC ad as well) and figure out why it doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

Include Video

Video makes your offer more appealing by explaining your offer and helping your visitors connect with you. You can make your video funny, serious, or anything in between, but the key is to make the video relatable to the offer and to the viewer.  It’s the appetizer to your landing page offering. It’s a good idea to give the viewer some control over the video. Autoplay videos with no volume controls are a terrible tactic! But if your video is an excellent one, you could get people to share your landing page with others.

Like with all copy tweaks, you need to test and retest to ensure that what you change actually improves audience responses. A/B testing is the core key to effective landing pages. You should always be testing your pages to see how well they’re performing, making more tweaks as you receive data from your experiments.  After you make a change, take a look at your conversion after 100 clicks and see how well you do. Did it do better or worse? Learn from that and keep improving until you get the biggest conversion rate you can!