You’ve invested lots of precious time and money in designing, developing, and launching landing pages for your products or services. You’ve launched your marketing campaigns and poured money into advertisements, but you’re met with a disappointing revelation. Not enough people are converting on your landing page.
It’s a problem that countless marketers and business owners have faced. No matter how much time and resources you put into launching a new product, if your landing page isn’t converting visitors, then it won’t be successful.
Designing a useful landing page that will convert your website visitors is crucial, no matter what industry you’re in or what service you provide. Ideally, you want every page on your website to be optimised for conversions, but landing pages need extra attention.
Luckily, designing a solid landing page doesn’t require hours of hard work and investment. With this guide, we aim to show you some simple ways you can improve your landing pages for conversions.
Craft excellent headlines
The very first thing your website visitors are going to see on your landing page will be the title or the headline. As such, you need to make sure that your headlines are relevant, eye-catching, and interesting, in order to keep their attention.
Not only do you need to catch your audience’s eye with the headline, but you also need to intrigue them so that they will want to read more of the page. Where possible, try and use exciting, engaging words that will evoke emotion in the website visitor. Hubspot has a great blog title idea generator which will generate engaging blog titles for you, complete with the latest buzzwords.
SEO is something you must take into consideration, as well. If you want your landing page to perform well, then you’ll need to pay attention to the keyword usage throughout the page, as well as in the headline. While you certainly shouldn’t cram your content with too many keywords, as this will negatively affect your rankings, you should use your keywords throughout your content sparingly, and logically. The keyword you want to rank the highest for should ideally be close to the start of the headline.
Deliver valuable information
Textual content on a landing page can often be overlooked, as many believe that the most important areas are the calls-to-action and the visual content, however, this is simply not correct.
As with any website page, the text content should be as relevant and concise as possible, but this is especially important on a landing page. Since you’re trying to get your website visitors to perform a particular action, like purchasing a product or subscribing to a newsletter, your text needs to be written in a way that doesn’t distract the user from taking that action.
If for example, your landing page is designed to drive people to purchase a specific product, including text content about an unrelated product will confuse the website visitor. Similarly, you don’t want to provide them with too much information as this could turn them away — keep the text you have relevant, concise, and not an eyesore!
Many may think that less text is better, and while this can be true in some scenarios, you usually want to find the middle ground. Don’t avoid text content altogether as then your users will be left scratching their heads, but don’t overload them with information either as they might get bored and leave!
Ideally, your text content should provide value to the user, so don’t just copy and paste text from a competitor’s website. Put some time and effort into crafting unique, engaging text content that will draw the visitor in and get them interested in what you offer.
Use strong CTAs
If you’ve dabbled in the world of online marketing or website design, then you probably already know about CTAs or calls-to-action. As the name suggests, a CTA is a specific area of a website where a user is directed to perform a particular action. Usually, this is in the form of a button, pop-up, or a simple line of text.
CTAs can be used to prompt a user to complete many actions such as to purchase an item, subscribe to a newsletter, explore other areas of the site, complete a contact form, or download a file. This is why you’ll often see CTAs as simple buttons with the text “buy here”, “download now” or “contact us”.
Now good CTAs are ones that are clearly visible, and obvious in their intent; meaning the user should be able to instantly understand what action they should be taking. Using a CTA is a great way to drive conversions, and it’s crucial that you include relevant CTAs on your landing pages. Failing to do so will mean that you’ll potentially miss out on lots of valuable conversions.
An ideal CTA will be placed above the fold, so the user sees it straight away, rather than having to scroll through lots of content. It should be bright, easily visible, and well designed. Inside the CTA, your text should briefly explain precisely what you want the user to do, in an informative and non-intrusive manner.
When designing a CTA, you should try and avoid using text that’s too spammy, like “buy now” or “click here”. While this might work just fine in certain situations, users are getting better at noticing when companies are trying to sell you something, so you don’t want your content to come across as a sales pitch. Avoid intrusive, outdated designs and any irrelevant text.
There are many useful resources you can use as guidelines for creating a good CTA, such as Optinmonster’s.
Optimise loading times
Something that many marketers and website developers alike ignore when creating a landing page is the loading time. It’s no surprise that you want your website, in general, to load as quickly as possible, with as little downtime as possible, but the importance of this is often underestimated.
To put this into perspective, let’s take a look at the following infographic from Kissmetrics on Neil Patel’s website (https://neilpatel.com/blog/loading-time/):
As you can see, not only will a slow loading time reduce the number of conversions, you’ll also run the risk of turning people away from your website altogether. 40% of all users will abandon a website if the page takes more than 3 seconds to load, so you should remember to optimise your website’s speed.
Typically you’ll want your website pages to load in at least 2 seconds, ideally much less. The faster your landing page loads, the better, as people will be able to see your content more quickly, and they will be more likely to convert.
Conduct A/B testing
Testing is often one of the most overlooked aspects of any marketing campaign, only because it can be easy to ignore or forget about. Failing to test your content, however, can potentially ruin your chances of success.
A/B testing is the process of testing which version of a landing page results in more clicks, more conversions, or a reduced bounce rate. The content will be the same over both versions, except for one item being different, such as the headline, CTA, or image.
Conducting A/B testing might sound like a lot of unnecessary hard work, but if it’s done right, it absolutely isn’t! Using a testing tool such as Crazy Egg’s A/B Testing, you can easily test two different versions of a landing page and collect information to better understand which version to use.
Analysing the results of continuous A/B testing will allow you to create the most engaging landing pages possible. You’ll have the opportunity to increase conversion rates which can, in turn, increase your profits, increase visitor engagement, and understand more about your customers.
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