Designing Landing Pages that Convert: Key Elements to Consider
Are you spending a lot of time and money on your online marketing?
If so, you’re likely obsessing over bids, targeting, and creative design. But how much attention are you giving to pages where your traffic lands — the very place where conversions happen?
You’re not alone if you’ve been focusing mostly on the ‘ad side.’
Yet, the effectiveness of your landing pages can make or break your marketing ROI.
In this post, we’ll dive into why landing pages are critical to your marketing success and discuss some of the key elements you can incorporate so that your landing pages are primed for conversion.
So, what is a landing page?
In simple terms, a landing page is a dedicated page on your website that’s specifically designed for visitors clicking through from marketing campaigns like your PPC ads, social media campaigns or email newsletters.
Landing pages are conversion focused.
They are designed to encourage users to take a specific action like making a purchase, registering their interest, or signing up for an email newsletter.
To help them achieve this conversion goal, a lot of landing pages remove distractions like unnecessary navigational links or unrelated content to keep the users attention on the action you want them to take.
Because they are optimised for conversion, landing your marketing traffic on a dedicated landing page can often lead to improved conversion rates and a better ROI from your online marketing efforts.
What are the main elements of a successful landing page?
Good landing pages don’t happen by accident.
The best landing pages include a combination of elements like compelling headlines, persuasive copy, eye-catching visuals and strong CTAs to help encourage visitors to take the action you want them to take.
Relevancy to the ad or campaign the traffic came from
The beauty of a landing page is that you can tailor your content to match the keywords people are searching for, or the ads that they have engaged with.
As an example, let’s assume an accountant offers a range of services like self-assessment returns, payroll services and tax advice.
Without a dedicated landing page, a user might search for the keyword “local accountants for self assessment”, click on a Google ad that promotes self assessment services, and end up on either the homepage or the ‘services’ page of a website.
With a landing page, the user is directed to a dedicated landing page that is laser focused on self assessment, with a strong clear call-to-action to get in touch to find out more.
The more relevant your landing page is to the ads that users have engaged with, the more likely they are to convert.
Headlines and subheadings
Your headline and subheading are the first things that a user is likely to read on your landing page, so it’s really important they make the right impact.
As a general rule, your headline should be short, snappy and attention grabbing, and your subheading should encourage the reader to stay on the page by suggesting you have the solution to their problem.
Make your landing page mobile friendly
The latest report on web traffic from Statista shows that 58.33% of all global web browsing is now completed on mobile devices.
Things obviously vary based on whether you’re a B2B or B2C business — but based on these stats, it’s more likely that someone is going to access your landing page on their mobile than their desktop.
So making sure your landing page displays correctly on smartphones is really important if you’re going to convert your visitors!
Pay attention to loading time
Have you ever clicked through on an ad, and then been faced with a slow-loading page that seems to hang forever.
There’s nothing more frustrating!
If you’re more patient than me, you might stick around and wait for the content you’re after.
But you’d be in the minority — 62% of people are likely to leave your website if your landing page takes more than 5 seconds to load and it’s actually estimated that a one second delay in loading time can reduce conversion rate by as much as 7%.
So if you want to retain your site visitors and have the chance to convert them — it’s important that your landing pages load quickly.
Some great tools for measuring the load time of your webpages are Pingdom and
Craft concise, persuasive copy
There’s a time and a place for long blocks of descriptive text. But a landing page is not it.
The best landing pages use short paragraphs and bullet points to quickly and easily communicate the features and benefits of the products and services being promoted.
We’re not going to go into lots of detail on copywriting frameworks here, but a lot of the best landing pages use established formulas like PAS (Problem-Agitate-Solution) or AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action)
Want an example of PAS for our self assessment accountant?
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Get in touch for a no-obligation consultation today.
If you’re curious about the different copywriting frameworks, there’s a great article over at GetGenie.
Include relevant visual elements
Adding relevant images and videos to your landing page can really help to get your message across and improve your conversion rate.
Simple infographics can help illustrate how easy your process is, or highlight key benefits of choosing your business — which can be especially helpful if you have complex product or service offering.
If you need any persuasion to include visual elements, it’s estimated that landing pages that have relevant videos can see as much as a 86% increase in conversion rate.
Use a compelling, prominent call to action (CTA)
Perhaps one of the most important elements of a landing page is the call to action.
This is the button or text that encourages the user to take the action you want them to take.
Typical CTA buttons you’ll probably be familiar with include generic examples like “Book Now”, “Download Now” or “Shop Now”.
In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with a short, snappy, action oriented CTA button.
However, there’s a general trend to move towards more descriptive and relevant CTAs, for example on a landing page for our self assessment accountant, something like “End your self assessment stress now”.
Whether you choose to go short and punchy or be more descriptive, it’s really important that your CTA button stands out on the page. It’s the button that you want people to click — so make sure it draws their attention with clever use of colour, contrast and positioning.
Keep your forms short and sweet
Lengthy forms can be a conversion killer.
If you’re capturing customer details in a form on your landing page, it’s really important to try and strike the balance between the quality of leads and quantity of leads you generate.
The more data you capture in a form, the more likely you are to be able to qualify and tailor your pitch for a prospect.
On the other hand, the more complicated you make a form, the less likely people are to complete it.
A really useful article by Hubspot found that the optimal form length is between 5–10 questions, with a pretty dramatic drop off in conversion rate when forms contain any more than 10 fields.
So keep those forms short and punchy where you can.
Include social proof
Reviews and testimonials are also important to include on a landing page, as they help to build trust and credibility with potential customers.
By showing legitimate customer reviews, ideally from a trusted third party review solution like Trustpilot — it can help reassure people on your landing page and make them more likely to convert.
One study by boast.io found that adding testimonials to a landing page helped to boost conversions by as much as 180%.
What are some good examples of landing pages?
If you’re looking for some great examples of landing pages to take inspiration from, I can highly recommend taking a look at the following collections:
20 Great Landing Page Examples You’ll Want to Copy — Hubspot
15 Landing Page Examples PROVEN to Convert — SeedProd
37 Best Landing Page Examples of 2022 — Unbounce
You’ll notice that the landing pages for each brand are all a little different, and that’s to be expected — there isn’t a single ‘right’ way to create a landing page.
But if you examine the similarities closely, you’ll also notice that the majority of them include a mix of the elements we’ve discussed in this post.
Looking to improve the performance of your marketing with custom landing pages?
I hope this guide has given you some tips and inspiration to get started crafting some great landing pages of your own.
But if you’re busy running a business, or spinning a dozen plates in an overstretched marketing team — it can be challenging to set aside the time for creating new landing pages.
If you need any support in putting together landing pages to improve the conversion rate of your online marketing activity, I’m here to help.
Just drop me an email and we can arrange a time to chat!
