#WeBuildWednesdays Episode 22: Free Landing Page Grader Tool

Optimize for Conversions

What’s up, guys!? Mike Norris here. Today, we’re going to look at landing pages and determine if they’re set up optimally for conversions.

A Quality Landing Page

This is a company I just found. I randomly did a search for golf lessons near me because I suck at golf like most other people and I wanted to get a pretty good example here for this. I like the landing page. I like how it’s set up. They have a form up here on the right. They have relevant information above that, so if you were to look at it on mobile, you’d still see a little bit of information before you hit that form. But the form is still high up on the page, which is great.

Moving down, they have really nice imagery here and a little bit more information. They make sure that they show you all the different things that they would cover in these lessons. They go through your golf swing, learn to improve faster, etc.

At the bottom, they have another CTA down here, along with a video, some social proof, testimonials like “What Our Students Say” and “Tools For Success.” Really, everything you need is on here. Here’s the map. You can find out exactly where these locations are. You can look at the individual locations, find some near specific zip codes, all that kind of stuff.

Free Landing Page Grader Tool

But what’s more important than this landing page at all is this Landing Page Grader that I have open in another tab here. I don’t know if you guys have heard of Unbounce. Probably not. This is how I know of them is mainly just through this tool. This is the best landing page analyzer tool that I’ve come across to date. As you can see, on this page, they have something from Rand Fishkin. He’s the founder of Moz, which is a really respected SEO software, so they have pretty good backing. But what I did is I went through a little bit of this page, filled out some of the form, and I want to show you what this spits back at you because it’s awesome.

This will bring you down on the page to a place where you can put in the URL for your landing page, you answer some basic questions instead of a forum, like “What’s your primary source of traffic?” In this case, we know it’s paid, because we clicked from a paid ad. You’ll put in three to five keywords or phrases that you use and from your traffic source. “Golf lessons,” “swing evaluation,” “custom club fitting,” all things we saw on the page. You put in your industry and your page’s current conversion rate. I’m kind of assuming they have about a three-percent conversion right here. I don’t really know but we’re just going to assume three percent. Here’s my name. Here’s everything else and let’s analyze the page now.

It’s Monday morning, so I have my Starbucks here. I’m ready to go. Sweet cream vanilla… sweet… vanilla sweet cream latte? I have no idea what it is. I really don’t.

The Final Grade

Alright, this is where the magic happens.

So this is an analysis of that page that I showed you and it looks good, right? It looks good from the onset… well, it only got a sixty-three percent. What I love about this tool is it’s going to break this down into individual categories, such as page speed, mobile friendliness, security, message match, all that kind of stuff. And it will give you recommendations based on what information you put in and what it analyzed on the page.

High Priority Improvements

Let’s take a look at some of these. Here are your high priorities, so what they would want you to look at overall. They want you to add some important keywords above the fold, take about 20 minutes overall, it tells you exactly how to fix it. They can build more trust by adding social proof to their page. We saw some of that social proof so this doesn’t necessarily need to be in here. There’s a box we can check later on that tells this software that we did have social proof. Improving page speed, pretty much everyone is going to get this when they put in a landing page. Page speed is just always one of those things that optimizing tools like this tell you can be doing better. In some cases, you can. In some cases, you really can’t. Open graph tags that make social sharing easier. Depressing images on the page, again, just getting that site speed in there. But let’s dig into this a little bit and see a little bit about what it’s telling us.

Page Size

What’s so cool here is you can see your page size and you can see how that compares. Ideally, they like your page size to be less than one-point-five megabytes here. We’re looking at eleven-point-four-eight megabytes. This is a huge page, but they have a lot on it. I mean, if you guys remember the page, they had tons of images—images are going to do it—and page requests. So you want to aim for below 70-page requests. This is a server thing. You probably won’t be able to mess with this too much, but the fewer requests your server has to make, the quicker it’s going to be. This is some more stuff that you could do to improve your page speed, so it gives you some more information on it and then it tells you what images you can compress and how much space that will save, which is amazing. So that’s one way you can do this.

Mobile Friendliness

Moving down into mobile friendliness, this one’s good. It’s mobile responsive, and that’s pretty much all they grade you on here. As long as your page is going to show up nicely on these different devices, you’re good. This one, in particular, looks great on a tablet.

Conversion Optimization

Moving down, we want conversion center design, so this is going to make sure that everything is optimized for conversion, specifically. It always gives you a little sign here for above the fold. This looks really good above the fold, but it always just wants you to take a look at it and make sure that it is. This is one area where there’s a little bit of controversy, I’d say, in the industry about this. It’s sort of a philosophy argument. In some cases, people like to link out to other places on their site because you can get all the information that you need to make that conversion, that sale. And some people like to put it all on that one page and not have the navigation in the top of your page. So this one in particular is linking out to different pages and you can see that right here. It’s linking out to the whole site, but again, it’s one of those things where you just want to A/B test it to see if it works better to have your navigation in, see if it works, and determine what works best for you.

CTA Buttons

CTA copy looks good. They have eleven visible fields. If you’re looking for a sheer number of conversions, fewer form fields is going to be better. If you’re looking for more quality conversions, more form fields is probably going to be better. But you don’t want to be intrusive, so you want to kind of keep this as minimal as possible so you’re not bothering people when they’re filling out the form. That could lead to lower conversions.

SEO

SEO on here does not impact your overall score since, in this case, we said that all of our traffic was only coming from paid. Since it’s not coming from organic, it doesn’t really matter. But it does tell you how you appear on Google regardless. If you’re able to be indexed, if your page title was optimized, your meta description, your h1 tags, all that kind of stuff.

Security

Trust in security. Obviously, you want to be trusted. Like I told you before, we can click this little box here to show that we do have social proof, so our overall score jumped up to 71 for that, which is great. SSL encryption, that is the HTTPS right here in your URL. You definitely want that. That basically means that no one’s data can be taken when they’re on your website, so it just builds trust and it’s a really big thing with Google now and pretty much any website you have, you’re going to want it to be HTTPS and you can do that through whoever your hosting provider is.

Message Match

Message match is important. Obviously, you want your message on your landing page to fit with the keywords that you’re looking for and that you’re targeting. “Golf lessons” is on the page six times, “swing evaluation”, three, “custom club fitting”, two — none of those are above the fold, so again, I don’t know their total goal. I think golf lessons is a good one. They should probably have that above the fold, but the others maybe are not as important to them, but it’s something to look at.

Open Graph Tags

Down here, open graphs tags. An open graph tag is something that you put in your meta properties on your page in the backend and it’ll essentially tell any kind of social network like Facebook, Twitter, what information it should pull when someone links to that page on the platform. So if I were to link to this golf page right now, I don’t think it would appear properly. There’s a chance it might but it might be a little bit weird, it might have a wonky title, might not have a cool description, it might not pull an image, so the link wouldn’t look that great. So that would be something they’d want to clean up if they had any hope of driving traffic here via social media.

So that’s an overall look at the tool. It’s really great when you sign up for something like this. They do send you emails, so I did have to put in my information through the forum and it just comes with that. But for a free tool, this is extremely robust. It gives you a ton of data and it’s absolutely great to look at, so take that with a grain of salt, I guess.

Thank you and happy Wednesday!

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