Why is it so important to optimize landing pages for conversions?
Before we talked about optimizing the overall website, just some general pointers. What we’re talking about now is specifically individual pages.
And we’ve talked about this before, but just to recap, if you might not be familiar, your website is a collection of website pages. Actually, it’s kind of funny. When I got into website building and website development, I actually started with building funnels and landing pages. And it was all just one page. I didn’t even, I did use ClickFunnels. And I think there’s another platform as well, but ClickFunnels was definitely one of them.
I run Pest Control SEO, a marketing agency for pest control companies. And I want to show you that you’re just building a one page landing page and that’s all you’re doing. But a landing page could actually be any given page on your website.
Again, your website is a collection of pages. So you could hypothetically have 100 landing pages within your domain. And that might be xyzpestcontrol.com/termite-control or /pest-control-chicago or /pest-library, whatever.
Technically everything’s a landing page if it’s literally a page that they land on. That’s how to think about it.
The 2X Conversion Increase Is Real
Why it’s so important to optimize those landing pages, again, when people are landing on them, we want to be getting as many customers as possible. Obviously.
If a lot of people already come to the page, why wouldn’t we, again, I’ll give the example of 10,000 people land on the page. If maybe 100 people convert, if we could just do a little bit of optimization and end up making 200 people convert instead, that is a 2x in leads. Which is absolutely insane.
And this is particularly important regarding landing pages because this is actually where people land. What we covered before was more the technical SEO component of overall page speed. But now, what we’re going to cover in this post is the individual components within the landing page.
The Hero Section Sets the Tone
What structure and layout consistently converts?
I usually like using a hero image at the beginning of each page. So that might be a technician. That might be you. That might even be a customer. It’s usually a technician.
And again, the thing I said of a technician smiling, doing something. What they call the hero section. Your technician is the hero and it should be a good picture of them. They are well lit.
And then, so that will usually be on the right side. This is very classic. That’s on the right side. Then the left side, you have a headline.
And the headline should be some kind of call out. Immediately call out the market. Hey, are you, and this might be a termite control Chicago page. “Hey, are you looking for termite control in Chicago?”
And they’re like, “Whoa, yeah, I clicked on this page. That’s exactly what I was looking for.”
Okay, awesome. There will be a little description under that, or at least this is kind of the typical format. The description under that will be some kind of confirmation of that.
“Okay, awesome. Well, you landed in the right place. Green Day Pest Control is the pest control company for you. We’ve been in business for 10 years. We are locally owned and operated. We love serving the Phoenix area, Houston area, Chicago area, whatever.”
I’m just kind of making up things as I go here, but just building some trust, building some kind of confirmation there. And then some kind of call to action at the end there.
“Hey, so if you’re ready to get rid of your pests today,” or “Hey, if you’re looking to get a free inspection with us now,” or “Hey, if you’re looking to learn more, then click the call button below.”
And then you will have a call button right there.
Don't Use Both a Call Button and Contact Form
We typically like to have a call button on the first page instead of a contact form. And we usually don’t like both because they kind of conflict with each other. Now people aren’t really sure which one to do.
So we just like to have a big call button on that front page. Make sure it’s big. Make sure it is a unique color that stands out. It’s not the same as your headlines or your text. And it’s in big letters, big button.
And it’s very clear. It’s really almost the first thing you see when you land on the page and it’s the thing their eyes keep going back to.
So that is really the first element of the page. I don’t think I’ll get into every single element, but I’ll definitely mention a few.
Your Landing Page Is a Funnel
Really another way to think about this is there’s so many funnels that go into marketing. As in converting a lead from cold to warm to closed.
Your website page that someone lands on, that is a funnel in of itself. Top of funnel is the top of the page. Bottom of funnel is the bottom of the page.
You are taking them through this process. Really, I mean, they can even convert at the top of funnel, but still you have to allow people to go through the full funnel if they want. Which some people will want to do.
A lot of people, or not a lot, but some people will want all the information or will kind of just naturally scroll through the whole page because they almost feel FOMO. It’s like they feel like they don’t know everything before they go through the page.
Which isn’t, that shouldn’t stop you from putting a lot of content on. But still that’s something to consider as well.
Add a Google Reviews Widget
Regarding the other components we want to have on the page, like we mentioned before, I’d like some kind of review integration. That way we can demonstrate some trust and that should usually be for your top Google Business Profile.
If your top one has 500 reviews and your other ones have like 20, obviously use the one with 500 reviews because that one will have the most.
There are plenty of different, I think there’s a plugin on WordPress that I think is just called Google Reviews Widget, something like that. You can just search that up on WordPress plugins, install that plugin and use that. Or there are many other different ones. You can use any of those.
Demonstrate Value and Expertise
Some other components that you want to have in terms of conversion, I would say is just overall, and actually something we’ve been talking about, like with Facebook groups, it’s just providing value.
Demonstrating that you know what you’re talking about. “Hey, here’s our pest control process.” So someone can see very clearly, “Oh wow, okay, you guys are really thorough. You guys look out for every single pest. Wow, you can look out for even earwigs. I didn’t even know that was a thing.”
So demonstrating value, demonstrating expertise. Another way to demonstrate value is saying, a really easy one, which we always mention, and this is a really common question is, what are the most common pests in the area?
So that’s something really simple. Someone, they might just see some bite marks around or they might see some small little pieces of poop around or something. And they’re like, “What is in my house? I don’t know.”
So that’s something also really useful of just, what are the most common pests? This also ties into what Google’s looking for for ranking, which is relevance. What is relevant to this topic of Pest Control Chicago? Well, the most common pests in Chicago. Well, how we do pest control in Chicago. What are the frequently asked questions? Giant sewer rats in Chicago.
All those different things and also making sure that it’s relevant to that particular topic.
Don't Just Duplicate Pages and Change the City
This is one of the many mistakes here. I will see, if you’re building out your website, you’re building out your web pages and specifically these location pages, a lot of times people will just duplicate them for every single one and only change the city.
And there’ll be super basic generic pages. Same images across each one. Same headlines across each one. Except all they will change is the city name across each one.
This really is something we shouldn’t do because we should keep it relevant to the search. The person who’s searching wants something that’s as relevant as possible.
What are the most common pests in Chicago? How is Chicago different from Northbrook? What are maybe some of the suburbs we serve in Chicago? Or maybe a story we have from doing pest control in Chicago?
Those make it more relevant. And relevancy increases conversion.
So that’s kind of a very long winded answer for the site architecture, the landing page architecture.
Create Separate Pages for Different Services
Should you use separate landing pages for different pest or service types?
We want to split these up as much as possible and really as much as it makes sense. I’m always looking at it from an SEO first glance.
When we’re looking at these different keywords, we usually don’t want to set up a page if it’s not getting any traffic. So you can see very clearly that something like Pest Control Chicago gets 1,000 searches a month or something.
I used to live in a really small town, Golf. If you search Pest Control Golf, zero searches a month because Golf is so small. People, they might even, people in Golf might even intuitively search Pest Control Glenview because that’s the city nearest and it’s much bigger.
But people even intuitively know that they’re not going to get relevant search results. So they’ll search the city next over instead.
So yeah, you should make tailored pages to each of these concepts so you can rank on those keywords. And so we can also make Google Ads campaigns and Facebook Ads campaigns and potentially other platforms, and send traffic, targeted traffic, to those pages.
And that’s kind of the beauty of this. It’s not just for SEO, but it’s also for advertising.
Show People, Not Pests
How important are visuals like images and videos on the actual landing pages?
I think the images are really powerful and really helpful for conversions. It’s not so much of a ranking factor, really isn’t. I mean, Google does like to see EAT, which is experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust.
But I would say the images are more from a conversion component. And again, like we were talking about with the Google Business Profile, when people land on the page, instead of seeing a bunch of pests, I see this all the time, there’ll just be a bunch of pests on the page. Or maybe a picture of the truck. Or maybe a picture of the equipment.
Instead of that, because pest control isn’t sexy, by the way. Pest control is kind of gross. I don’t want to see ants. I don’t want to see raccoons.
I want to see the nice technicians that’s going to come to my house. Wow, that’s Jerry and he’s smiling and maybe he’s holding a rat upside down. Maybe it’s John in the truck and he’s like, hey, he’s waving out the window.
Just keep it kind of nice and friendly. I’d say maybe friendly is the keyword there. Another one we like to use is fun.
Keep it friendly with the photos. So I think this is so obvious, but a person should be in the photos and they should be smiling and have that characteristic. They should feel friendly.
So it’s not aggressive or it feels kind of scary. A lot of pest control customers and prospects will be women. So they are more prone to feel like, “Well, I don’t want this big scary guy coming to my house. I don’t want them around my children. That guy looks, not good.”
Versus like, “No, Jerry looks like a nice guy. And wow, I even see a video of him servicing and maybe even a photo of him talking with the customer. Yeah, no, of course I have no problem. Is that Jenny from down the street? I have no problem with him coming to my house. He seems like a great person.”
And now I’m looking at the reviews that might be embedded on the page and wow, they’ve gotten so many great reviews. And I even see Jerry got mentioned here in one.
That’s something we really want to have. We really want to have photos on these pages.
Use Unique Images on Every Page
Also, ideally they should be, well, really, not even ideally, this is, whatever. You should have unique photos across each of these pages. And this is kind of for Google, but also for people.
Don’t use the same images across every single page. This gives Google more content to index. So even when Google is understanding your website, they can see all these different images and see that you are a real company.
And also this gets rid of the duplicate content aspect, which I haven’t even really covered because we’ve been talking mostly about conversions. But when Google sees that you have all the same stuff across several pages, it’s either only going to rank one or it’s not going to rank any of them because it doesn’t want to see duplicate content.
And the reason they do that is because people don’t want duplicate content. They don’t want to land on your Pest Control Chicago page, be like, “Well, I actually live in Glenview.” And then they see the same thing. They’re like, “What?”
It’s just kind of weird. It feels kind of fake where we want to connect with our audience.
I see that a lot where the whole site almost looks the exact same. Same pictures. Same everything is everywhere. And it might even be stock images and AI images. I see a ton of stock images.
Those, people can tell. And that does hurt your trust and people’s willingness to work with you. It’s like, why use a stock image? Even your picture from your iPhone 8 that is taken sideways and someone’s on a roof or something is better than that stock image because it’s real.
Now more than ever with all the AI stuff, people want real. We’re in a trust recession.
Test Across Similar Pages
How can you effectively test and optimize these landing pages?
I don’t worry about that too much because we’ve kind of dialed in a framework at this point. But what you can do is, because I still do think about it from an SEO perspective, not so much of a Go High Level split testing perspective, we can change some things.
If we really want to do this and we still want to do SEO properly, then we can change this across two website pages, two location pages that are performing pretty similarly.
One maybe gets a little bit more traffic, but they get about the same conversion rate. And hey, let’s try changing something on page number two that might get a little less traffic. But we can still definitely tell, “Wow, the conversion rate went up from 20% to 30%. Dang, okay, we should definitely do this on the other page then.”
So we don’t necessarily have to do A/B split testing, but we still can do something like that while not hurting our SEO. Which is testing it on different pages that are similar.
End Strong or Lose Warm Leads
What are some of the things that we missed as far as mistakes that people make?
In terms of optimizing for conversions, we just about covered it all. We talked about the sticky header in one of the last posts.
I’d say maybe the final thing to close off here is make sure you end the landing pages with something really strong.
They have gone through the whole page. Depending on how long it is, it might just be five sections or it might be 15. But make sure, some people are going to want to scroll through the whole page, get all the information.
When they get to the end of the page, they better convert. You better, maybe you give them a better offer. Maybe there’s sparkles all around or you do all caps or just something to really catch their attention.
They are not leaving your page without converting. No matter what, do not let them leave your site. They went through the whole page. They are such a warm lead. Do not lose them there.
Start Building Better Landing Pages Today
The bottom line is this: landing page optimization can double your conversion rate without spending a dime on more traffic.
Use a hero section with a smiling technician. Call out the market immediately with a relevant headline. Add a big, bright call button. Show reviews prominently. Demonstrate expertise by answering common questions. Use unique, friendly photos on every page. And end strong with a compelling final offer.
Don’t duplicate pages and just change the city name. Don’t show pests instead of people. Don’t use stock images. People want real. They want to see Jerry smiling in the truck.
Your landing page is a funnel. Take people from top to bottom. And convert them before they leave.
Keep Learning and Growing
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