Perhaps you’ve focused too much on on-page optimization. There’s no denying that engaging and compelling content makes your readers want to read some more. But what if your content doesn’t generate enough visitors and leads?

An assured way to get the right kind of traffic is by adding landing pages to your site. A landing page assures you of catching the right market for your business. But how do you draw people to your landing page? What elements should you include? What are the best practices for landing pages?

This article is a guide on how to create a landing. It also provides landing page best practices to help you create such a page that converts. Also included in this guide are reasons why you should include this kind of page on your website. Let’s start!

What Is a Landing Page

Landing pages aren’t the pages that people land on after clicking an ad or a link on an email. This is not the truest definition of a landing page. Think of it this way: you can add a link to the Contact Us page, but this page is not a landing page per se. A landing page is not an evergreen page that sticks to the website’s general appeal and message.

Landing pages are standalone pages that, most of the time, are short-lived. They serve a specific purpose for a particular target market on a particular campaign duration. These may or may not connect to how the webpage looks. Landing pages are designed to convince visitors to act, for example, buy a product, download an ebook, and the like, in exchange for buyer information.

There are two ways how people are directed to a landing page:

  • Organic search 

When people query something, and landing pages turn up on the ranked search results. When the landing page is ranked, the value proposition and brand positioning are very clear.

  • Paid Traffic Search and Marketing Campaigns

Landing pages designed for a marketing campaign are often accessed from a paid ad or email. Since the former has high intent value, these pages should include testimonials and product reviews because leads are ready to purchase the product.

Why You Need a Landing Page

You can market products and services in many ways, but did you ever wonder why there’s still a lot of marketers who prevalently use landing pages? Here are the reasons:

  • Increase and reinforce brand visibility
  • Ramp up sales
  • Improve SEO standing
  • Gather more leads
  • Increase conversions
  • Increase additional information about the target
  • Assess metrics associated with business goals
  • Improve credibility
  • Promote brand exclusivity
  • Increase email subscribers
  • Provides added value to your proposition

How Do Landing Pages Work?

It begins with a compelling call to action, which directs the reader to the landing page. Convinced, the reader fills out the necessary information provided in the form. This converts the reader to a lead. The information given by the lead in the form is stored in a database and analyzed to understand further who they are.

Types of Landing Pages

Looking at how most landing pages look, one can surmise that these pages can be categorized into three, based on the buyer’s journey.

Lead Generation Landing Pages

These pages collect data, through a form, from potential customers in exchange for a product or service. This kind of page is ideal for lead nurturing. Lead generation landing pages can be used in all three stages of the buyer’s journey. Commonly, you’d find this type of landing page among B2B marketers.

How Can This Help You?

  • Learn more about your contacts
  • Identify potential buyers
  • Match you with potential leads who’d most likely buy

Distinguishing Feature: Form to gather information. These forms act as the CTA.

Click-through Landing Pages

Landing pages of this kind focus on the call to action buttons, which leads the buyer to do some action. You’d often find the buyers being directed to another page where the action is completed, like paying for a product. More often, click-through pages have testimonials and reviews to back up product credibility. Again, this is commonly seen among SaaS marketers.

How Can This Help You?

  • Makes purchasing easier

Distinguishing Feature: Call to action buttons.

Squeeze Page

Squeeze pages are landing pages that only collect emails from possible leads. Squeeze pages don’t have long propositions. Often, these are simple landing pages with few lines. Often, squeeze pages only contain two kinds of fields: name and email address. This is the most popular landing.

How Can This Help You?

Gather lead information to begin lead nurturing

Distinguishing Feature: to be used for email marketing

Anatomy of a Landing Page

A landing page is your website’s elevator pitch. With this one page, you present what you offer to potential customers. With that in mind, all elements must highlight such an offer; otherwise, non-related elements should be eliminated from this page.

Basic Elements of a Landing Page

You can create a landing page with all the trappings. But there are only four basic elements that your landing page should include.

Proposition

This should contain your unique selling point, the thing the sets your product apart from others. Your proposition should tickle your visitor’s interest. It should be presented briefly, so people understand what makes your product different.

Your headline and sub-headline should be straight to the point yet catchy. The second headline should be connected and augment what the headline is saying. That being said, you must understand who your audience is.

Benefits of Proposition

To further support your headline and sub-headline, you must also add the product or service benefits. You should be able to address your target market’s needs and problems. Therefore, you should include the features but highlight the benefits of using your products or services.

Call to Action

The call-to-action button pushes the reader to act by filling up a form, moving on to the page, and the likes. This should be simple and gets the message across, but it needs to conform to the overall appeal and look of the landing page.

Social Proof

Social Proof comes in different sizes. These can be a testimonial, a product case study, or a product quote from a known personality, among others.

What More Can You Add

Forms

Forms can be a vital element to a landing page, but it also carries the most important friction for a visitor- their information. You should see the balance between asking too much and getting too little information. This depends on your goal. Do you want to have more leads or more quality ones? If you don’t have any leads yet, consider adding fewer form fields. In contrast, add some more fields if you want to know more about your ideal buyer persona.

In many cases, people are hesitant to fill out these fields. So, to ease them into sharing, add a freebie, a tip sheet, for example. Otherwise, You could exchange a complete industry report for more information.

Icons and Images

Adding product images can be useful when you’re highlighting a product with lots of features.

Images are better processed than words. With a clear and well-designed icon, a landing page can easily get the message across. Icons work well if there are texts that accompany them. Here are some tips when adding icons to your landing page:

  • Make sure that the icons are easily distinguished
  • There must be a text that goes with the icons for easier understanding

Videos

Videos are being utilized for landing pages too. Most people would rather watch videos than read information. You can add explainer videos to the landing page if it’s complicated to explain them in text or what you’re selling is a novelty item. You can use introductory videos when the company is new. Finally, video testimonials would show how satisfied your customers are with your product.

How to Create a High-Converting Landing Page

A successful landing page combines the right styling elements, placed strategically, and a touch of persuasion.

Landing pages should be SEO-friendly

You should target long-tail key phrases when creating landing pages because there is less competition with such keywords compared to the shorter ones. Here are other tips to make your landing pages more SEO-friendly:

  • Make sure that those keywords are still on-spot with the search intent.
  • Make sure that your content is readable to humans.
  • Avoid keyword stuffing.
  • Take advantage of secondary and semantic keywords that augment the primary keyword.
  • Make sure that you include your keyword at the beginning of the title.
  • Provide a clear and on-point description of what the landing page is all about.
  • Make sure that the URL is short.
  • Your headline should be catchy and contains words that can potentially hook the reader.
  • Your H1 heading and meta title should match.

Landing pages should be more than one. There’s a 55% increase in leads when the company employs more than 15 landing pages. B2B companies benefit from more landing pages, especially when they create more than 40 landing pages.

Here’s a tip: Create a headline that begins with “How to” to tickle your visitors’ fancy. Who wouldn’t want to learn some information for free, right? Of course, you can also target the need to do things fast and quick or the need to stay updated.

Call to Action

The call-to-action must be the most prominent element on your landing page. Also, you should limit to one call-to-action as this has a higher conversion rate at 13.5% compared to having 5, which only garnered 10.5%. Also, your call to action should be above the fold. The offer should be clear and concise. You want your visitor to do one action and only one action. Having lots of links and calls to action defeats the goal of conversion.

Your landing pages should also have social proof. You can have higher conversion rates when you have testimonials and reviews on the landing page than when you have none of the social proof.

Entice your reader with your call to action; get them excited and find their trigger points. For example, instead of putting “Click This”, why not use the phrase “Show Me How to Get More Leads”. Take the Netflix landing page, for example. It showcases what you get when you subscribe with the assurance that you can view movies at any given place and cut your subscription off anytime. Also, note that your eyes would go straight to the red-colored call-to-action.

netflix

 

Your call-to-action button must be big enough to be clicked by a finger, something that would greatly improve your user experience, especially on mobile devices.

Don’t get too fancy on call-to-action shapes. People are more inclined to click buttons that look familiar to them. You can emphasize how the CTA buttons look by adding shadows and the likes. Not all your visitors are internet-savvy, so creating realistic CTA buttons can be helpful. On the other hand, a more computer-adept can benefit from a flat-lay design.

There should be no outbound links other than your CTA

Outbound links only drive your visitors away from your landing pages. That being said, you shouldn’t add links to your images, logo, and within the body of your content. Instead, the link should only be in the call-to-action. Anything that redirects your visitors to another page would most likely reduce conversion rates. In addition, removing the navigation links on the landing page could significantly increase your conversion rates.

Provide strong social proof

You need your readers to trust you, and you need to convince them too. So here are some tips on how to add social proof to your landing page:

  • Add product reviews from previous buyers
  • Add a real name and photo of that person in the testimonial or review section
  • Use the most positive testimonial as to the feature review
  • Include testimonials from high-profile people and companies
  • Use the review from an expert
  • Embed reviews of your product from social media platforms
  • Include few details about the reviewer, like the full name, title, and company
  • Include trusted security trademarks near the payment field
  • Provide statistical proof
  • Add awards
  • Add social counters

You need to arrange your elements properly

Make sure that the most important parts are on the top fold. As they go further down the page, they tend to skim the highlighted areas. Organize elements with similar characteristics.

Speed

Page speed adds to a great user experience, and this also reduces bounce rates. You can improve page speed by having smaller images, fewer requests, and redirects. In addition, landing pages that don’t require image compression have higher conversion rates than landing pages that require over 1MB compression.

Customize your landing pages

It’s common that you can have more than one target market. Each of these target markets would have specific desires and needs. That being said, you should have tailor-cut landing pages that are suited for each of them. Research the buying behavior of these personas and the keywords they use to target them further.

Get your message across clearly

Your message should be clear that visitors know what to do when they arrive at your landing page. If the visitors came from an ad, make sure that the ad is clear on its proposition; it should also match what is offered on the landing page. The copy, logo, headline, and images should be the same.

Your landing page should have one goal

If you want to get them to signup, you can provide them with a free trial on your landing page. Similarly, you should provide white paper or reports when you want them to download from the landing page. However, putting two kinds of call-to-actions on one landing page is a big no-no. This would confuse your visitors. That being said, create separate landing pages for a download goal and signup goal.

Choose the 60-30-10 Rule

A great landing page should only have three colors. Using the 60-30-10 Rule, you can easily guide your visitors to your CTA. Sixty percent of the color of the landing page should be the background color. This should be soft and not overpower the other two.

White is the preferred choice because it complements all colors. Other than white, you can opt for any monochromatic color that’s closest to the base color. The latter takes up 30% of the landing page color scheme. You should add this to your form, footer, and header. This color should be complementary to the last color, which represents the remaining 10%

The last 10% is the accent color, which should be complementary of your base color on the color wheel. This is the boldest color of your landing page. Your CTA and logo should be this color.

Placement

Make sure that your call-to-action is placed on the top fold so that your visitors would instantly know what you wish them to do. But, you also need to put another CTA at the end of your page, especially when you have a scrolling page.

People don’t read; they skim. Make sure that the headlines and headings contain your proposition