Landing page optimization for scanners
I like to talk about building landing pages that are optimized for scanners. No, not the ones in the movie but for the people who look at web pages scanning them to get the idea of what the page is about. Most SEO experts will tell you “content is king” or “write for the visitor not the engines’ and I agree with those comments but when it comes to landing page optimization I think you need to look at it a little differently. Jacob Nielson (www.useit.com) says that one of the major facts about web use is that people tend to scan or skim pages looking for words or phrases that catch their eyes. If a landing page has more then a few paragraphs they are also likely to print it out than read on a screen. Not good for your conversion rates if you ask me. So why do we scan? We are scan to save time. Why read every word when we can get the overall idea from images, callouts, buttons, bullet points, and highlighted words. We also look for things that grab our attention and for the bits and pieces that match our interests or the task, product, or service we need. To be honest, we are damn good at it too. Let me show you an example of a landing page that shows how the scanner scans a page:
heat tracking model of a scanner
The heat tracking map was from a study done at SEOMOZ.org and as you can see the red areas are where web visitors spent the most of their time looking. Actually, this pattern of eye tracking is a very common pattern with most web consumers as the top right is the favorate place for most people to spend their time as you can see from the image below:
top right is top priority
Also note how the red spots on the image to the right are split up some and the big sale banner did not get any long views. This is due to the fact that the banner stands out and be seen quickly and the message is read instantly. This is not a bad thing as the landing page gives back valuable time to the web visitor to look at other parts of the page that need more time for the web visitor to figure out like navigation, smaller images, and search boxes.
So how can you create a landing page that is optimized for scanners? Well for starters, design your page around the information we talked about. I am a big fan of keeping landing pages short and sweet. Use headlines, bullet points, limited copy, different font colors, font sizes, and font treatments such as bold and italicized. When you are all done get ready to start performing landing page optimization it to maximize conversions.
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