VIDEO: The Home Depot on Landing Page Optimization [#CZLNY]

How can brands create a highly optimized landing page? During her session at ClickZ Live New York, Erin Everhart, SEO manager of The Home Depot, broke the process down into four parts: research, convert, test, and analyze data.

Before building an optimized landing page, a business should conduct research and find out what its consumers like and dislike, as well as what they expect to see on the site, explained Everhart.

“Your users can tell a wealth of information about you,” she said. “As a business owner, you don’t use the site as your users do. For example, as search marketers, we use Google. But we are not average Google users, because the average Google users don’t know anything about algorithms.”

The most important step during the research process, according to Everhart, is sketching personas. “Techniques you can use include listing all the users on your site, listing stations why they would come to your page, and creating ‘I want/I need statements,'” she said, adding that the company can then use social validation to decide what key features they want on the landing page.

In order to gain a high conversion rate, a landing page should avoid “information overload.” “Don’t give [consumers] too many choices [on your site], because they won’t choose anything at all,” Everhart noted.

She continued that testing and analyzing with basic metrics like click-through rate are two other essential steps to setting up a highly optimized landing page.

What are other key elements to a highly optimized landing page? How should brands conduct usability testing and A/B testing? And what sources can a business use if it doesn’t have a big budget like The Home Depot does?

Watch the video interview below to hear what Everhart had to say.