Landing pages are webpages that are typically used for promotional purposes and lead generation. Users often encounter a landing page after clicking an advertisement or hyperlink, and these pages can be optimized to encourage users to take a specific action (such as make a purchase or fill out a contact form). Landing pages can be an effective component of your marketing strategy. Learn how to use landing pages effectively with this guide.
Why are landing pages used?
Businesses use landing pages to capture leads and generate sales. Here are some additional benefits of landing pages:
- Boosting awareness of your products and services
- Moving prospects along the sales funnel, bringing them closer to buying
- Growing your email list
- Building credibility
How to develop a landing page: What should be on them?
There are four key elements of a good landing page: visuals, copy, calls to action (CTAs) and SEO attributes.
Visuals
By nature, humans are visual creatures. Great visuals can help sell your products and services by keeping prospects engaged longer. In addition, visuals can give prospects a better understanding of what you're offering. The types of visuals you use will vary from page to page. In some cases, you may use one type of visual, and in others, you may use a few different types. Create a flow that gets your message across. Here are some examples of visuals you may use:
- Still photos
- Animated GIFs
- Videos
- Infographics
- Charts
- Illustrations
- Maps
- Screen captures
- Comics
- Typography
Copy
Copy refers to the words used in your marketing materials. Copy helps get messages across to readers and could improve a webpage's search engine ranking, which would make it appear higher in the search engine results. Every webpage needs copy. Craft copy carefully to help prospects understand what you are selling. Scroll down to learn how to write landing-page copy.
CTAs
Make it easy for landing-page visitors to convert by using CTAs that clearly state what you want visitors to do. For example, consider the following CTAs:
- Contact us for a consultation
- Schedule a free trial
- Download our e-book
- View all products
- Write a review
- Add to cart
- Claim your offer
- Join now
To help improve conversions, always add a CTA that people can see without having to scroll. If your content is longer than around 600 words, add another CTA toward the bottom of each page, closing off your content. A CTA can be in the form of a clickable button or a web form for capturing contact information. One of the most common CTAs for e-commerce businesses is a Shop Now button that brings a user directly to an e-commerce store.
SEO attributes
Search engine optimization (SEO) sets your website up for success by improving your webpages' search engine rankings. The higher your webpages rank, the farther up in search engine results they will be. You can improve SEO by including the following attributes on every page:
- Title tag. This is the text that comes up on the search engine results pages and on the browser tab of each page.
- Optimized URL. Write your URLs strategically to include keywords. A good URL is a shortened version of your title tag, for readability purposes.
- Meta description. This is the text that summarizes what each page is about. It may appear on search engine results pages.
- Keywords. These are strategic words or phrases to incorporate on your website. Users are searching for keywords and phrases on search engines such as Google, so the more you can incorporate them naturally into your copy, the more likely you are to "rank" for them. Use one main keyword per page. The content on the page needs to match up with the keyword. For example, if you want to get ranked for "dog food," your page should include information about dog food, how to choose a dog food, what makes the best dog food and so on. Use an SEO tool to examine which keywords will help you rank.
- Alt tags. These are descriptions that are applied to images to help search engines identify what each image is about.
- Links. Hyperlink to both internal and external pages when applicable.
How long should landing pages be?
When you're considering how long landing pages should be, remember to focus more on content quality than on length. Google does look for length when ranking pages, typically 600 words or more, but keep in mind that the goal of landing pages is ultimately to get prospects to buy what you're selling.
If creating long landing pages does not make sense or is not working well when you evaluate the results, reduce their length. You may find that a lot of companies have very short landing pages that are fewer than 300 words. It's important to write for people, not for search engines, and testing pages is one way to gauge your results. You can always create longer content in blog posts that are linked to landing pages to help boost your ranking.
How to write landing page copy
To help increase landing-page conversions, consider these four tips:
1. Know your audience.
When you know your audience, you can craft copy that speaks to them, such as by directly answering their questions or making bold statements about problems your products and services can solve.
2. Use words that your audience understands.
Consider the education level and locations of your target audience. For example, if your target audience is located in the U.K., you might use the word "mate" instead of "friend." And if you want to sell your financial planning services to recent college graduates, you might define terms such as 401(k) and Roth IRA and explain the differences.
3. Be direct when telling readers what to do.
Your landing page should cause your visitors to take some kind of action, but you need to make sure they know what you want them to do. CTAs should be concise, declarative and directional. Consider using words like these:
- Buy
- Submit
- Contact
- Schedule
- Call
- View
4. Answer basic questions.
Make sure your landing page addresses the four "W's" and one "H": who, what, where, why and how. By answering these questions, you can help minimize objections and give readers a good understanding of why they need your product or service.
Bringing it all together: landing page formatting
To help create attractive, organized and clear landing pages, follow this standard format:
- Start with a headline.
- Give an introduction of what you are offering.
- When applicable, include supporting information, such as testimonials.
- Close with a CTA.
Throughout your pages, be sure to break content out into several small paragraphs, and when applicable, use lists. Small pieces of content, as opposed to big chunks of text, are easier to read. In addition, where it makes the most sense, add visuals and subheadings. Subheadings are the headings that follow the main headline. Subheadings help make content more scannable and can help with SEO. Traditionally, subheads are used on pages that have more than 600 words.
How to add a landing page to your website
Depending on the type of content management system you have, the process of adding a landing page to your website will vary. Traditionally, there is an "Add new page" button that you will select. From there, you will design your page and click a Publish or Save button to push the page live.
We'll walk you through the process using WordPress, one of the most popular content management systems. Here's how to add a landing page to a WordPress website on the Divi theme:
- Log in to your account by entering your username and password.
- From the left side of the dashboard, select Pages and then choose Add New.
- Insert your content, including the title, body text and images. Then, click Publish.
It's that simple on WordPress!
Examples of successful landing pages
As you create your landing pages, it's helpful to see some examples from other businesses to serve as inspiration. The pages we've chosen follow the landing-page development best practices. Keep in mind that what counts as being successful to one company may not be successful to another, as "success" has a lot of variables. Overall, these are excellent examples.
Company: Golden Spiral
Standout features:
- Has a headline that draws prospects in
- Restates prospects' common problems
- Outlines what prospects can expect in exchange for their information
- Includes a bold and short download form
Standout success metrics:
- 7,693 page views
- 1,300 form submissions
- 1,080 new contacts
Company: Cloudways
Standout features:
- Uses a visually and contextually bold heading
- Has a subheading that answers a question some prospects have
- Features a bold CTA that's impossible to miss
- Includes a customer testimonial
Standout success metrics:
- A 25% improvement in the overall conversion rate
- A 30% improvement in free trials
A/B testing, or trying out different versions of the page to see which is more successful, helped make the page a success, according to Owais Khan, marketing manager at Cloudways. Here were some components of the strategy:
- Resonate better with the audience by improving the messaging and user interface
- Show all of the information the audience expects and requires, with less friction
- Improve user engagement
- Place a CTA where necessary, and remove the rest
Company: Chocolate Pizza Company
Standout features:
- Images that draw visitors in
- A subheading that clearly and directly tells readers what they can expect
- Direct and clear CTA buttons that make it easy to shop each collection
Standout success metrics:
As of Nov. 21, 2020, this page is the third most visited page on Chocolate Pizza Company's website, following the company's main homepage and chocolate pizza page. Considering the company has over 100 pages on its website, this is an impressive statistic.
Company: ResumeGo
Standout features:
- Interactive videos that answer questions and restate prospects' problems
- Additional photos that show how the company's team has helped other clients
Standout success metric: The page's conversion rate went from an average of 2.2% to 6.5%.
Landing page metrics to track
After you've created your landing pages, it's time to evaluate their performance. Tracking landing-page metrics will help you get a good understanding of how your landing pages are performing and what opportunities you have to make improvements. Google Analytics, which is free, gives you access to valuable data. The landing-page metrics you should track will vary depending on your business goals. However, most companies will benefit from tracking these standard metrics:
- Page views. By tracking the number of views your landing pages get, you can see which pages are the most popular and which pages aren't getting the traffic you'd hoped, and adjust accordingly.
- Sessions. This metric is categorized as the total number of sessions within an active date range and how long a user is engaged with each page. It often gets confused with page views because of the way it's laid out in Google Analytics. This example pulls data from the same date range, but the data is very different between page views and sessions.
- New users. This metric tells you how many people visited your site for the first time during a certain date range. If your goal is to acquire new customers, this metric is especially important to monitor.
- Bounce rate. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page. Every website has some bounce, but a high bounce rate can signal that something is wrong with your landing pages.
- Top pages by page This metric shows the most viewed webpages on your website. If you are running advertisements that push traffic to certain pages, it's useful to know how those pages are performing compared with other pages.
- Average session duration. The more time people spend on your website, the better. Longer sessions typically mean users are more engaged with your content, which leads to higher conversion rates. This metric shows the average amount of time users spend on your website.
- Revenue. As a marketer, you want to be able to determine your digital marketing return on investment, and tracking revenue is one key metric in doing so. You can compare revenue with marketing expenses to calculate your overall return on investment for your marketing budget.