Liz MooreheadYou’re here because something isn’t working.
Your landing page is live, traffic is coming in, and the results are nowhere near what you expected. Maybe your boss is asking questions. Maybe your client is breathing down your neck. Maybe you’re staring at your dashboard wondering why numbers that should be moving aren’t moving at all.
I’ve been in that exact position.
It’s a mix of panic, urgency, and (quite frankly) feeling a bit of a knock to your ego. You thought the landing page would perform better. You’ve already put in the work. Now you’re trying to figure out what’s broken, how fast you can fix it, and what changes will actually improve conversions instead of making things worse.
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Here’s the good news.
Landing page optimization isn’t guesswork.
It’s not throwing new headlines at the wall or redesigning your entire page because you’re frustrated. Effective landing optimization is a process that you can learn. You diagnose the real problem, form a clear hypothesis, change one variable at a time, and test your way toward better performance.
That’s exactly what this article will walk you through.
By the end of this article, you’ll know:
- How to determine where your landing page is failing
- How to understand user behavior through time on page and scroll depth
- How to match intent from ad to page so users don’t bounce
- How to identify friction points that block conversions
- How to prioritize changes in the right order
- How to run clean tests that produce reliable results
- How to know when your optimizations are actually working
This is your step-by-step system for diagnosing what’s wrong with your landing page and improving conversions with confidence. It’s also a real method you can explain to your team, justify to leadership, and rely on anytime performance dips.
1. Start with the psychology and intent of your “someone”
I’ve talked about this before, but the psychology of your user is where you always begin. Before you worry about layouts, forms, colors, or copy, you have to understand who you’re actually building this landing page for: a single human being with a problem they’re trying to solve.
I always tell people: speak to someone, not everyone.
If you try to appeal to the entire world, you connect with no one. Your job is to understand the specific person who’s about to land on your page and what is going on in their world the moment they click.
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That starts with getting aligned with the targeting of your campaign:
- What platform are you using?
- What audience is being sent your way?
- What keywords or interests are driving traffic?
Once you know who you’re attracting, you can dig into the psychology:
- What motivates them to act?
- What triggers a purchase or a form fill for someone like this?
- What emotional state are they likely in?
If you have persona documents or purchase trigger data, use them. If you don’t, you can still get there through research, social listening, or even conversations with anyone on your team who interacts with this audience. Look for the real reasons they buy. Look for the fears or frustrations they bring into the moment of clicking. Look for the language they naturally use to describe their problem.
This is empathy in practice.
This is the difference between “I know your life is hard,” and “I understand the emotional moment you’re in and what you came here to accomplish.”
Once you see your “someone” clearly, every decision becomes easier: your headline, your hero image, the length of the page, the tone, the value exchange, the next step you ask them to take. If you can’t articulate who that person is and what they’re trying to do right now, your landing page is guessing. And guessing is the fastest way to tank conversions.
2. Slow down to speed up by building a real hypothesis before you touch anything
When a landing page isn’t converting the way it should and people are asking questions, you want a fix immediately. You want to stop the bleeding, so to speak, by making changes fast… and so does everyone else around you. New headline, new image, new form, new layout. Anything to show movement.
That instinct is the thing that trips most people up.
You can’t optimize a landing page without a hypothesis. If you start making changes without knowing why you’re making them or what outcome you expect to see, you’ll end up masking the real issue or creating a completely new one. Worse, you’ll have nothing to explain to your team or client when the numbers move in the wrong direction.
A hypothesis forces you to slow down long enough to think clearly.
It keeps your decisions rooted in data, not panic.
Here’s what that means in practice:
- Identify the symptom: Low conversions, high bounce, poor scroll depth, unqualified leads. Your goal here is to name the actual problem you’re seeing.
- Diagnose the cause: What do you believe is driving that symptom? A misaligned headline, the wrong audience, weak value exchange, confusing layout?
- Predict the outcome: If you change this one thing, what should improve? Time on page? Form completion? Qualified lead volume?
If you can’t say those three things out loud, you’re not optimizing. You’re guessing.
When you take the time to build a simple, clean hypothesis before touching your page, two things happen. First, you’ll stop wasting energy on tweaks that won’t matter. Second, you’ll put yourself in a position to explain the strategy behind your decisions, which is exactly what the people breathing down your neck need to hear.
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Once you’re grounded in the right mindset, then you can start diagnosing the real source of the performance problem.
3. Identify where your landing page is actually failing
Let’s dig more into the diagnostic step I just spoke about. When you strip away the noise, every landing page problem falls into one of three buckets. Once you know which bucket you’re in, the rest of your optimization plan becomes obvious.
Bucket 1: No one is getting to the page
If traffic is barely trickling in, you don’t have a landing page problem at all. You have a front-end issue. It might be keywords, creative, targeting, or the wrong message in your ads. Either way, you can tweak your landing page all day and nothing will change until you get the right people arriving in the first place.
When this happens, the problem lives upstream: in your media strategy, keyword targeting, creative, or audience alignment. This is the moment to pause and ask, “Is this even my problem to solve?”
If you’re running paid search, check whether the keywords you’re bidding on match the intent of the page you built. Sometimes volume is there, but the intent is completely off, so no one clicks. Other times, your highest-volume keywords aren’t represented on the landing page at all, which means Google gives you a low quality score. Low quality score means low ad visibility. Low visibility means no traffic.
If your traffic is coming from social or display, look at the creative and messaging. Misaligned ads will tank performance before the user ever reaches your page. You might have done everything right on the landing page, but if the front-end promise is unclear or irrelevant, people simply won’t click through.
And in B2B environments (especially with retargeting campaigns) you might learn the hard way that you’re targeting the wrong audience entirely. Again, no landing page adjustment will solve that.
Bucket 2: People get to the page but don’t convert
This is the most common scenario.
Users bounce fast. Or they scroll, but nothing hooks them. Or they click on the form and then abandon it halfway. All of these fall under the same umbrella: something on the page is breaking the promise that got them to click. Fixing that starts with understanding where the drop-off happens and why.
How do you do that? Installing behavior analytics tools.
Hotjar, lucky orange, or Microsoft Clarity are non-negotiable for this process. Without them, you’re shooting in the dark. These tools show you how people actually behave on your page: how long they stay, how far they scroll, where they click, and whether they start or abandon your form.
I don’t rely on my gut here. I rely on what these tools tell me, because behavior doesn’t lie. If you skip this step, every optimization decision you make is based on assumptions rather than evidence.
Then begin your diagnosis with the two signals that tell you the most: time on page and scroll depth. This is always where I look first, because these two numbers give me the clearest picture of what’s going wrong.
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If someone lands on your page and leaves after a few seconds, it usually means the hero section is broken. Either the message doesn’t align with what they expected to see based on the ad or keyword that got them there, or the page doesn’t immediately communicate who it’s for and what problem it solves. Somewhere between the click and the first impression, the promise got broken.
But sometimes you see the opposite: people scroll deep but spend almost no time doing it. That tells me the page isn’t skimmable or engaging. The content might be overwhelming, irrelevant, or too slow to deliver value. They’re looking, but nothing is sticking.
These two data points alone tell you whether the issue sits above the fold, somewhere in your interior sections, or in the way you’re delivering information. And until you understand that, you can’t make a meaningful change.
Bucket 3: People convert, but they’re the wrong people
Sometimes the problem isn’t conversion volume at all. It’s conversion quality. I’ve been in situations where the form was blowing up with submissions, but none of them were from the people we actually wanted.
One example that still sticks with me was a mystery-shopping client.
On paper, the page was “converting.” In reality, every lead was someone trying to apply for a job as a mystery shopper. Not a single person was interested in buying the service. The landing page was doing its job mechanically, but it was attracting the wrong crowd entirely.
When that happens, the fix isn’t about tweaking buttons or rearranging sections. It’s about clarifying who the page is for and tightening the signals that tell the right people they’re in the right place.
Quality issues are almost always messaging issues.
Something in your headline, your imagery, or your offer is speaking to a different audience than you intended. You need to revisit the copy, re-anchor it to your actual buyer, and make the intent unmistakable. When the right person shows up, they should feel, “This is for me.”
When the wrong person shows up, they should immediately self-select out.
4. Deeper landing page optimization strategies (based on what’s broken)
Once I understand where the friction is happening, I don’t jump straight into random fixes. I look at the part of the page that has the biggest leverage. And nine times out of ten, that means starting with the hero section.
How to optimize your landing page hero
If the message at the very top isn’t aligned with the ad or keyword that brought someone in, the rest of the page doesn’t stand a chance. That first section needs to make it obvious who the page is for, what the offer is and what problem you’re helping them solve. If someone scrolls for three seconds and leaves, it’s almost always because the promise that got them to click wasn’t reflected back to them immediately.
When the hero section is the culprit, the fix usually looks pretty simple. I match the headline and imagery to the user’s intent, and I make sure the language acknowledges the problem they’re trying to solve. This is always the highest-impact change you can make. If the opening doesn’t land, the rest of the page can’t recover.
How to optimize your landing page copy
But sometimes people are scrolling. They’re getting deeper into the page, but they’re only spending a few seconds as they skim. That tells me the content isn’t doing its job.
Maybe the sections are dense. Maybe the copy is too long for their intent. Maybe the value isn’t clear enough. Whatever it is, the page isn’t skimmable and it isn’t helping them quickly decide, “Yes, this is what I’m looking for.”
When that’s the problem, I tighten the content, break up long paragraphs, remove anything that feels like fluff and make sure each section moves them forward instead of slowing them down.
How to optimize your landing page form
Then there are situations where the form becomes the friction point. You can see this in your behavior analytics: people click the form or open the lightbox, start filling it out and then abandon it.
That tells me the value exchange is off.
Either you’re asking for too much information too quickly, or you’re asking for too little. High-ticket or high-complexity offers need more context gathering, not less. If I’m thinking about buying something worth ten or twenty thousand dollars and you only ask for my first name and email, I’m not confident I’m going to get a real, tailored follow-up.
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On the flip side, if you ask for sensitive information before establishing trust, people back out. The sweet spot is always about aligning your form fields to the value you’re promising next.
Ultimately, each of these fixes comes back to one simple rule: optimize the part of the experience that’s breaking first. Fix the hero if people leave immediately. Fix the content if they scroll without engaging. Fix the form if they start but don’t finish. When you work in that order, every change builds momentum instead of creating more guesswork.
5. A/B testing your landing page optimizations
A/B testing is one of the fastest ways to improve conversions, but it’s also one of the easiest places to mislead yourself. I’ve watched smart teams declare a “winning” variation based on data that was never reliable in the first place. So let me walk you through how I test pages in a way that actually produces trustworthy results.
I start with the tools built for it. I primarily use Unbounce because it’s built for landing page experiments, but HubSpot works too if that’s where your pages live. What matters isn’t the tool as much as having a clean environment where you can isolate variables.
And speaking of variables, this is my hard rule: I only change one thing at a time.
If you tweak the headline and the hero image and the form layout all at once, you’ll never know what actually moved the needle. Clean testing is controlled testing.
I also run both variants at the same time. Never run Version A in March and Version B in June. Seasonality, campaigns, budgets, even news cycles will distort the data. You think you’re measuring performance, but really you’re measuring timing. Running both simultaneously eliminates that problem.
Finally, I don’t end a test early. I wait until it hits statistical significance; 95 percent is the benchmark I use. If you pull the plug too soon because one variation looks “hot,” you risk anchoring your decisions to noise instead of signal. Unbounce calculates significance for you, so there’s no guesswork.
Good optimization comes from disciplined testing. The more disciplined you are, the faster your landing pages improve.
6. Additional landing page optimization levers I use all the time
Once the foundations are in place (the hero is aligned, the content is skimmable, the form meets the value exchange), there are a handful of levers I pull to get incremental lifts, and I come back to them because they consistently improve landing page performance:
Align the landing page with the user journey
Whatever promise you made in the ad needs to show up instantly on the page. If someone clicks expecting one thing and lands on something that feels unrelated, your conversion rate will collapse. Consistency builds trust. Inconsistency kills it.
Include the search terms that matter for Quality Score
This is not keyword stuffing. It’s acknowledging that Google Ads needs to see alignment between the query, the ad, and the landing page. When that alignment is clear, your CPC drops and your visibility improves.
Use dynamic text replacement
For campaigns with location-based or variant-driven needs, I use dynamic text replacement. It makes the page feel more tailored without forcing me to build a dozen separate versions.
Make conversions easy
Forms and CTAs need to be impossible to miss. They should live above the fold, be easy to reach, and follow the user as they scroll if the page is long. If it takes effort to find the next step, conversions fall.
Remove escape paths
I also use a 1:1 attention ratio for bottom-of-funnel pages. That means removing navigation and eliminating any escape paths. If the goal is conversion, everything on the page should support that goal. Once someone completes the action, then you can guide them back to the main site.
Social proof always matters
Testimonials, recognizable logos, third-party ratings… social proof works because people want reassurance that others have trusted you and had a good experience. It’s a credibility shortcut.
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Finally, I optimize the thank-you page
Most teams ignore it, but it’s an asset. A strong thank-you page confirms the next steps, sets expectations for follow-up, and keeps the relationship moving instead of dropping the user into a dead end.
These levers aren’t magic, obviously. They’re small shifts that compound over time. When you stack them on top of solid fundamentals, your landing page performance changes fast.
Stop reacting, start optimizing with purpose
It doesn’t matter whether you’re dealing with low traffic, low conversions, or the wrong conversions altogether. The answers are always in the data, and the path forward is always in the order of operations.
When you approach landing pages this way, you stop chasing symptoms and start solving real problems. And once you’ve done that a few times, you’ll never look at landing pages the same way again.
You don’t need a complete redesign. You don’t need fifty new ideas. You need clarity, discipline, and a willingness to test your way into better performance. Follow the process, trust the data, and your landing pages will get better: consistently, predictably, and without the panic spiral that usually comes with underperforming numbers.
That’s the whole point. Optimization should give you control, not chaos.
