Tips For Creating An Optimized Landing Page For Your Paid Advertising Campaign

Every effective paid ad leads to a well-designed landing page that reinforces why a prospective client should take action, ultimately leading to a conversion. If you’re getting consistent clicks on your ads but your conversions are lagging behind, here is how you can optimize your landing pages to ensure you are engaging your website visitors every single time.

What is a landing page, and how can dental practices benefit from them?

If your paid ad copy catches the eye of a prospective patient and causes them to click, it’s your landing page that does the really heavy lifting of encouraging them to complete the conversion (i.e. contact your office). As the name suggests, a landing page is the place where a user lands after they click on your ad link. Once they’re in your ecosystem, you have complete freedom to create a page that will spur them to take the next step and contact your office.

There are several distinct elements of a great landing page, but what is the best practice for optimizing a landing page for Google Ads? A great landing page requires attention to detail in order for the experience to be seamless for a prospective patient. The “one bad link in the chain” metaphor definitely applies here, as perfect individual elements can easily be undone by a misstep somewhere else on the page.

Paid ads are a very valuable strategy for dental practices, largely because they allow you to target prospective patients looking for specific services, and they capitalize on the immediacy of the moment perhaps better than any other digital marketing channel. When you are able to effectively target your ads to people who are primed to make an appointment now, you can significantly increase your website conversion rate, and your landing page is the final step in making it happen.

The basics of landing page optimization

Creating a great landing page is more complex than it might seem at first, but as long as you follow a consistent protocol you can build landing pages for every ad that will guide your prospective patients to conversions. Here are the basic elements that are a part of any good landing page:

• Specificity
• Cohesive messaging
• Narrow focus
• Headline
• Visual design and layout
• Social proof
• Offer
• Call to action (CTA)

Starting off with specificity

Everything about a great landing page starts with specificity, and without a specific purpose for a landing page, it’s impossible to create one that will consistently engage and convert your website visitors.

“But I already have a well-designed homepage that has all the information they could possibly need to contact my office and make an appointment. Can’t I just link to that and trust that they’ll complete the process?”

Definitely not! Now let’s talk about a few reasons why not.

First, the entire purpose of the landing has to flow downward from your ad targeting and your ad copy. Unless you are able to nail those down beforehand your landing page will have no meaning. These three elements have to be in sync in order for a landing page to be effective. Your ad is attempting to convince a specific type of person to take a specific action, and the landing page is the ultimate endpoint of that journey.

Syncing your messaging with your ad copy

As we just discussed, harmony between your ad copy and your landing page is paramount. What are you asking the viewer of your ad to do? Are you targeting people who haven’t had a dental cleaning for a long time because of fear, and you want to reassure them that it’s ok? Are you reaching out to people who are searching for dentists in your area who perform a certain procedure or utilize some innovative treatment method?

These are the kinds of questions you ask yourself when developing your ad copy, and they need to be carried through to the landing page design as well. Consider how it feels for a prospective patient to get an ad describing the exact service they are looking for. Then they’re directed to a landing page that expands on that information just enough and gives them a quick and clear path for taking action. When the patient completes the contact form they are almost immediately sent specific correspondence relating to the service they were researching, without having to go through a general inquiry. In those situations, it’s almost difficult not to get a conversion.

Maintaining a narrow focus

You may think that once you’ve got them on your landing page, that’s the perfect time to educate them about every great offer and service that you provide and let them decide what they want to take advantage of. In reality, experts believe that presenting someone with too many choices can actually impair their ability to make a choice at all.

That means the simpler you are able to keep your landing page, the better. You have to be the guide, and including multiple options and offers only complicates the process for them.

There are some simple ways for you to keep your focus narrow. Keep the attention on a single offer that they can grasp in just a few seconds of viewing. Any extraneous information about your educational background or your philosophy toward patient care can be placed in another section of the website where there is less immediateness. Remove any clickable elements that don’t relate to the CTA, and minimize the number of data fields for the patient to fill out.

Coining an effective headline

It’s time to write a headline for your landing page, and this is where you need a bold, hilarious, memorable statement that will really stick with the viewer, right?

Not necessarily; it’s important to remember that you aren’t writing a headline for a print ad that’s appearing in a local newspaper circular. Those kinds of headlines have to pop off the page to get the reader to notice them, but you’ve already got their attention.

They made it to your landing page, so your headline mostly needs to reaffirm that they are in the right place and that you have a few more important things to tell them. Keep your language as plain as possible so they can grasp the headline quickly.

“Your [insert city name here] dentist offering [insert service here].”

“[City name]’s first dental practice to introduce [innovative service].”

These seem simple, but simple works in these situations. Save things that pop off the screen for your CTA and visual clickable element.

Building in social proof

Social proof has always been a powerful motivating factor for people, and it has only become even more important in an age dominated by social media and interconnectedness. Your landing page offers you an important opportunity to share some of the wonderful things that patients have said about you in order to put prospects at ease about your practice. Feel free to include snippets of reviews or other praise on a landing page, just make sure that it’s related to the content of the page and doesn’t obscure your CTA.

Incorporating effective design and visual elements

As is the case with headlines, it can be tempting to turn to distracting visuals in the hopes of grabbing a viewer’s attention, but once again that’s not the main goal here. Instead, the goal is to keep things simple by making sure the elements you want to stand out are doing so.

Carry your branding elements through to the landing page, and include a fair amount of empty space so the viewer can focus their attention on your CTA. If you have several sentences of text you need to display, consider using bullets as a way to break up the copy. Images should be clean and easy to understand, and videos are also a smart strategy because they allow you to pack more information into the place in a small amount of real estate.

All about your offer

Many people confuse the offer with the CTA, but it’s helpful to think of the offer as the “what” to the CTAs “how”. There’s no reason to get too cute with the offer; the viewer should already be interested in what you have available if they meant to click on the ad. The offer should simply be the moving sidewalk that draws them towards the CTA, and cements their enthusiasm for your practice. A time-honored strategy is to include some kind of deadline with your offer that increases the sense of urgency. For excellent examples, check out landing pages for credit card company ads, which almost always feature a compelling offer that is succinctly presented.

Finishing strong with a clear and compelling call to action

Here we go: the CTA is where you bring it all home and finally lock down that landing page conversion. The CTA is somewhat of a double-edged sword because in some respects all the heavy lifting has already been done. A likely prospect should be ready to accept your offer based on the info they’ve already absorbed, and the CTA should be nothing more than an obligatory step. However, if you drop the ball on your CTA you can undo an entire relationship you have been building throughout the ad and landing page experience.

In many ways, the CTA is the most elemental part of the landing page. It’s exactly how they can do what you want them to do. If your visitor doesn’t immediately know where to click for your CTA, then you’ve failed. It’s as simple as that.

Focus on a primary CTA, and make sure it is visually represented in some way. Also frequently double-check that all of your links and forms associated with your CTAs are coded and formatted correctly.

How you can turn your landing pages into a conversion powerhouse

Don’t let all the effort and resources put into your paid ads fizzle when the user clicks through. Use this guide to landing page tips to create well-designed, informative, and user-friendly landing pages that will act as the culmination of a great marketing strategy for your practice.

Paid ads landing pages are just one part of maintaining a holistic digital marketing approach. Contact Connect the Doc today to learn more about how we can use our extensive knowledge and experience to help you excel at every facet of your digital marketing.