How To Do Landing Page Optimization: A Step

Many great user experiences begin on a landing page, setting the tone for how visitors will engage with your business moving forward. 

Outstanding landing pages help convert a higher percentage of website visitors into customers. The question is: how do you optimize your homepage and landing pages to fulfill these promises?

Follow these steps to give your landing pages—and your business—an edge.

The best way to improve your landing page performance is to understand how—and why—your visitors really use the page. 

Knowing your users and analyzing their on-page behavior is critical to LPO. It helps you understand what drives, convinces, and persuades users to take action and puts you well on your way to developing a unique plan for optimization.

This three-step action plan leverages existing user data to identify areas of frustration and opportunities for improvement:

How do people reach your page, and what are they there for? They could come from a specific marketing campaign, online research, or someone’s recommendation—without knowing anything about you. 

If you don't consider the multiple paths users take, you can’t tailor the user experience and prioritize the right messages for the demographics that matter most to your business. These personalized user experiences are significantly more impactful and powerful than a blanket approach—letting you adapt and engage users when, how, and where it’s most valuable to them.

Instead of guessing or making assumptions, find out what drives visitors to your landing page by asking them to describe what they're looking for and why they want it in their own words.

Set up a quick on-page survey with open-ended questions. Ask them to share the main reason for their visit and find out what, if anything, is stopping them from taking action today. Then, identify the user personas representing your user base, and organize all the answers into a list of the main things people want to accomplish—or jobs to be done (JTBD)—through your landing page.

A barrier is anything that blocks a visitor from converting on a landing page: what turned them off, scared them, or annoyed them enough to go elsewhere?

Session recordings, heatmaps, and feedback widgets are powerful tools to follow real visitors’ specific actions on your landing page, and pinpoint when—and why—they run into issues. Put on your detective hat (a monocle and pipe are optional), then dive into user behavior and feedback analysis to find the biggest barriers to conversion:

Watch how people interact with your page. Set up session recordings to see how real people on different devices browse, scroll through content, click on buttons, and eventually abandon your landing page. This lets you empathize with their journey, spot any issues they encounter, and gather the visual data you need to fix and improve their experience. 

Find the most problematic sections on your landing pages. Set up a heatmap for a visual representation of users’ clicking, tapping, and scrolling behavior. Look for any important elements people fail to see or interact with—think links, buttons, and calls to action (CTAs).

Figure out what’s causing user frustration. Set up an on-demand feedback widget on your landing page and wait for people to share their thoughts. When you give your visitors the power to tell you about their experience, they’ll show you exactly what’s working and what isn't right as they experience it.

As you build your plan for optimizing low-performing elements on your landing page, don’t lose sight of what’s already getting results. Stay on top of what works well to attract conversions, so you know what to double down on.

Use post-conversion surveys or polls asking visitors what convinced them to convert—and what almost caused them not to. Then, analyze the results and categorize the main hooks based on how frequently they appear. This helps you discover actionable, conversion-boosting insights to implement for all other customers (or even use on other landing pages).

For example, here’s how a senior performance marketer at Hotjar gained insights from redesigning the search ad for the highest-traffic landing page—and applied her learnings to other pages: