What is a Landing Page?
What is a Landing Page?A landing page is an asset you present online to drive users to take a particular action. Dedicated landing pages are often separate from a website’s normal navigation – although they don’t have to be – and sometimes bear only slight resemblance to the layout of the parent website.
Other traits of landing pages include:
- They can be used for a pay-per-click campaign, but also have the ability to show up in the organic search results.
- They’re intended for users to land exactly on that spot from a search engine or online ad with a specific goal in mind for the user. Sometimes they may be invisible from the website’s navigation if the page is intended to promote a specific campaign or product, such as an eBook.
- They generally conclude with a specific call to action (CTA), such as to make a phone call, fill out a form or buy a product. Sometimes, though, the goal is as innocuous as getting the user to sign up for an email list.
- Sometimes their goal is to lead users to another page, such as the next step in a sales funnel. These are called click-through landing pages.
- If dedicated, they will often limit the other pages you can go on a site, if they let you click anywhere else at all. Some dedicated pages will just let you click to go to the homepage, if you don’t want to click on the call to action.
Landing pages can be optimized over time, but they are pretty much supposed to be airtight when they go live and are ready to accept web traffic. Even so, marketers occasionally leave a lot to be desired when it comes to landing page optimization. Hopefully, they’ve at least done keyword research and incorporated that term on the page before publishing it. However, a number of other issues can still arise when presenting a landing page that’s supposed to be a boon for a business.
Watch out for These Landing Page Optimization Mistakes
Whatever the objective, a landing page is supposed to provide a boost to your business in some shape or form. You’re not just doing it for fun.
So if you’re not putting a landing page together for fun, don’t shoot yourself in the foot by making one (or all) of the following landing page mistakes.
Unclear Path to CTA
If your call to action is in a poor spot or the reader finishes the copy and asks, “What am I supposed to do next,” then there’s a problem with your CTA and the build-up to it. As you’re writing the landing page, try to explain how your service or product will make the consumer’s life different, and basically why they need it. Have your text lead right in to the CTA, helping the user make a logical leap from reading to taking action.
Too Many CTAs
One may be the loneliest number, but it’s the only right answer when it comes to how many CTAs to have on a landing page. Don’t ask the user to either fill out a form or make a call. Pick one! If it’s a dedicated landing page, don’t ask visitors to follow your social media profiles in addition to whatever your final CTA is. Take away all the distractions and detours and focus on funneling visitors right to that ultimate call to action.
Copywriting Issues
You may think the user is mostly going to pay attention to the images, headlines and interactive elements you have on the page, but success will largely be determined by the quality of writing. Therefore, don’t commit the following five infractions related to copywriting.
• Writing for Too Many Audiences
Your landing page can’t be all things to all people. Don’t bring up a lot of, “Well, if you’re like this … But if you’re this type of person …” scenarios. Focus on one kind of consumer that you think will be likely to deliver your desired outcome, and then tailor the page to that buyer persona.
• Vague Copy
Making an emotional appeal without providing substance is going to hurt your chances of earning conversions. Get into specifics, use data and answer all the most-pressing questions in the reader’s head about the product or service you’re promoting. Dancing around specifics will drop trust with your audience, and conversions will then be hard to come by.
• Jargon-Heavy Language
Don’t write to consumers the way you would talk to other professionals in your industry. Using too many business clichés, technical terms and too much industry-related jargon will leave users scratching their heads, if not quickly bouncing off the page. Remember who your ideal consumer is, and break your product or service down to a way they can understand it, without all the platitudes and esoteric language.
• Important Info Obscured
Don’t bury the lead! Also, don’t bury important information in the middle of a large paragraph. Use call-out boxes, charts, graphic illustrations – whatever you need to make your most important info stand out. If it’s a stat or another piece of information that’s going to be vital to making a conversion, make sure it’s front and center.
A corollary to that technique is to break up long paragraphs and don’t write more than you need to. Many readers can tell when you’re rambling on, and most won’t stick with you from the beginning to the end of a long paragraph. Online users have become notorious for skimming the copy of a page. Writing for the web generally entails two- to four-sentence paragraphs, along with frequent usage of bullet points, images and headers.
Technical Difficulties
Does the landing page load too slowly and is it not mobile-friendly? That’s two strikes right there in the eyes of most users. If either or both issues apply to your page, it’s time to contact your web developer, or you may have to hire some outside help. To check the loading speed of your landing page, use this tool. To check if your page is responsive to mobile devices and to see what it looks like at different dimensions, try this tool.
URL Fails
We’ve taken over websites for clients and found old dedicated landing pages in their crawl reports that have “ppc” at the end of their URLs.
Yeah, don’t do that! Be sure the page’s URL is optimized, siloed correctly in the navigation (if not dedicated) and that it features the correct naming convention of the page before publishing. Also, make sure that the address is not too long, such as featuring every single word of the headline. Only use the most important individual words of the page’s header within the URL, and don’t over-optimize.
Outside Help is Available if You’re in a Bind
If you’re in over your head when creating a landing page or you’re not sure if an existing campaign is getting results, you have the option of turning it over to an expert marketing team. Eminent SEO builds custom landing pages and closely tracks results for dozens of businesses across various industries. We can help you with writing the page persuasively and finding premium imagery to supplement, as well as helping you shore up the more technical elements of your website. Hand the task over to us, all you have to do is wait for the qualified leads to come through.
To get started with creating or improving a landing page for your business, see our Landing Page Optimization Services page or call Eminent SEO today at 1-800-871-4130.
Great Points. Especially the one with not a clear CTA!
Keep up the great work!
Yes! CTAs and how you build up to them are critical. Thanks for reading!
It’s actually a great and helpful piece of information.
I’m happy that you shared this useful info with us.
Please stay us up to date like this. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks for your feedback, we’ll try to offer more posts on the latest techniques used in landing page optimization.