How To Create A Landing Page That Converts

Creating the best landing page design that converts is essential for any business that is looking to capture leads online.

But what makes a good landing page, and what does good look like?

Today, I’m going to take you through my top 10 tips for creating a highly converting landing page.

1. KISS – Keep it simple and easy for visitors to navigate
2. Headline – Ensure your headline is clear and compelling – so it captures the attention of your visitors and entices them to find out more
3. Social proof – where possible include social proof – either through testimonials or review site badges
4. Use quality images and videos – that accurately communicate your message
5. Strong CTA (Call To Action) – use strong CTAs to encourage your visitors to take the next step
6. Mobile, mobile, mobile – optimise your website for mobile devices
7. Test, test and test again – A/B test your landing pages to find out what resonates with your audience
8. Tone of voice and readability – using simple language and avoiding the jargon
9. Remove conversion blockers – ensure any forms are easy to fill out
10. Consistency – keep your page branding, style and layout in line with the rest of your website

KISS – Keep it simple and easy for visitors to navigate

By using a simple layout, and one that is consistent across your website, you’ll make it easy for your visitors to navigate throughout their journey, and reduce your website bounce rate.

You can achieve this by:

• Have a clear hierarchy – Use headings and subheadings to break you the content, ensuring you use H1 and H2 tags to maintain accessibility for those users with screen readers.
• Utilise whitespace effectively – keep paragraphs short and succinct. Helping users to scroll and scan your content. Mobile users especially require short paragraphs to reduce the feeling of overwhelm from walls of text.
• Use colours to your advantage – by using a limited colour palette you can keep to colours that complement each other and work well together.
• Use appropriately sized fonts – ensure you choose the right font for each device, and size your font to suit your visitors. Creating a “design bible” for your website is helpful as a reference point – e.g H1 tags are size 30 on desktop, 22 on tablet and 18 on mobile devices.
• Stick to decision confirming points – don’t include too much information, and ensure the information you do include helps to support the visitors decision making process

Headline – Ensure your headline is clear and compelling

By using strong, clear and compelling headlines you hook your readers into the content and stop them mid-scroll or from clicking the back button.

In addition to using emotive and powerful language you should ensure that your primary keyword is included near the front of your headline to aid your search engine optimisation.

Examples of strong headlines will convey the main benefits of your service or product, such as:

• Looking to be more productive? Get more done in less time with our productivity app
• Boost your confidence with our online coaching courses
• Unlock your potential with our personal development program
• Optimise your marketing budget with our performance audit

Include social proof

Social proof is a great way to convince your visitors that they’ve come to the right place, or found the right partner to work with. We all prefer to believe peers rather than marketing jargon.

There are many ways that you can include social proof on your landing pages:

• Customer testimonials – incorporate customer testimonials – I’d recommend no more than 3 per page, and if you’re spoilt for choice, then choose the ones that support the product or service being discussed on your landing page.
• Case studies – the next step up from a testimonial – sharing real-life examples of how a customer used your product or service, what the outcome was, and how they felt about it, is a great way to showcase how your product or service has helped others
• Review badges – rating badges or review badges like Google or TrustPilot et al are great ways of visually displaying product/service confidence from an external source
• Statistics – can you share or demonstrate how effective your product/service has been – e.g. increase in customer sales numbers, decrease in costs or improvement in conversion rate %
• Awards – If you’ve won any awards or received industry recognition – it’s a good idea to include logos that visually support this
• Media logos and influence/celebrity endorsements – if you’ve been showcased on a TV programme or in a magazine, or you’ve received a celebrity or influencer endorsement – include these to help build trust and credibility

Use quality images and videos

Using high quality videos and images to communicate your message in a visually appealing way, is a great way to boost your landing page effectiveness. But there are a few things I’d recommend when you’re looking to do this:

• High-resolution – It’s important to ensure that your images are of a decent resolution, they should look sharp and professional, not blurry. 
• Optimise videos for web – when you’re finalising your videos and exporting them, you can select settings to optimise them for websites, so they compress without losing quality. If size is an issue, break them up into smaller bite-size pieces that walk your visitor on a journey with you
• Evoke emotions with your images – creating a positive association with your images, be that happiness, excitement or friendliness, can be key in building that rapport with your visitors
• Relevancy – ensure that the images you choose are relevant for the content on your landing page – don’t just use a photo for the sake of it. If you don’t have a photo that suits, then initially you could use stock photography (just check commercial licences), but I’d recommend that you look for a local photographer who can provide you with a selection of photos that you can use (perfect for those of you offering a personal service, where you are the key element!)
• Storytelling – use your images and videos to tell a story – for example how it can help improve a customer’s life, solve a problem or answer a need
• Brand consistency – ensure your photos and videos are consistent with your brand image and the look/feel of your website. If you’re trying to portray a sensible professional image then a selfie of your at the local pub just won’t do
• Size recommendations:
  • Images – it’s best to use JPEG or PNG files that are optimised for web use. I’d recommend a resolution of 72 dpi, and ensuring that the dimensions work for your website – especially if you’ve a responsive website where the image can be cropped automatically depending on device
  • Videos – I’d recommend a MP4 video with a resolution of 720p or 1080p. When exporting, remember to compress the video as much as possible to avoid buffering. Ideally your video should be 2 minutes or less, but 5 minutes at the most – you’re looking to engage and entertain your visitors not bore them
  • File size – keep in mind that the more images and videos you have on your website, the slower your page load will be, which impacts your search engine optimisation and user experience. If you need to use lots of images/videos then make sure they are as small as possible in file size – without impacting quality.

Use A Strong CTA (Call To Action)

You’ve encouraged visitors to your website, they’ve read your content, and hopefully feel engaged, now you just need a strong call to action to hook them in. Here are my top tips for a strong CTA:

• Make it stand out – use contrasting colours for your call to action (CTA) button, so it stands out visually. If possible make the button size larger – though do keep mobile devices in mind and ensure it’s sized appropriately for each device.
• Use action wording – words like “start”, “download”, “buy”, “register”, “subscribe” or “get” are good examples of words that encourage your visitors to take action
• Make it clear – but make it clear what will happen with that action, for example “subscribe to our newsletter” or “download our free guide”
• Placement – make sure that your CTA is placed prominently, and if you’ve got a long landing page, don’t be afraid to repeat it at key points on the page journey
• Exclusivity helps – if possible (and honest) provide a sense of exclusivity – like “members only” or “exclusive access” – this provides visitors with a sense that they are part of a special group
• Limit choices – whilst we all love to have and give lots of options, it can cause confusion and hesitation, and if a visitor hesitates then they are also likely to leave without taking an action or purchasing. So provide no more than 2 options, but ideally 1 option with a route that holds their hand throughout

Mobile, mobile, mobile – optimise your landing page for mobile devices

Today more people view web pages on mobile than on any other device. As such it’s crucial that your landing page experience on mobile is optimised.

Here are my top tips:

• Finger or thumb friendly design – ensure that elements like buttons are large enough, and have enough surrounding white, space for a finger or thumb click. Avoid using in sentence hyperlinks for key navigation points.
• Responsive design – use a responsive design that auto adjusts the layout of your page for the device. But ensure you check how it looks, at least on your top devices (check your analytics or ask your web team for this information).
• Simple design – keep the design of your landing page simple – stick with a consistent design that is similar across your website, ensuring that it’s easy to navigate
• Optimise your images (see above for our tips) – but ensure your images are optimised for loading quickly for mobiles.
• Test, test and test again – test your landing page on different devices, you can either use a device emulator, if you have access to one, or ask your friends or connections – I often find a simple social media post asking for input is one of the best ways to get quick feedback and tips on what to fix

Test, Test and test again – A/B test your landing pages

A/B testing is a method of comparing two versions of your landing page, or two versions of an element against each other.

Here are my top tips for A/B testing:

• Write a hypothesis – being clear about what you are looking to achieve and how you are going to measure it BEFORE you start testing is great for keeping you on track
• Identify what you want to test – and how you want to test it – e.g. is it a colour change, copy change, layout change
• Control & Variant – every test will have a control page (your current page) and at least 1 variant page, which has the modifications on it
• Size does matter – ensure your test sample size is enough to provide viable results, and that you test over a long enough period of time – I’ve seen many tests that for the first few days it looks like 1 variant is winning, then the other will take over and stay the course.
• Pick the right tool – using a reliable A/B testing tool is crucial. I use Google Optimise, but other systems like Optimisely are good options
• One thing at a time – testing one element at a time is a good approach, especially when you’re starting out. When you become more proficient you can look at MVT (multi-variant testing) but it can become rather complex to work out the right combinations
• Retest over time – people change and so does their approach to your website, so it’s useful to retest over time to see if anything has changed

Tone of voice and readability

When writing your landing page copy, it’s important to use simple language, and avoid any jargon – or if you have to use certain words then ensure you explain them in simple terms.

It’s also important to keep your target market in mind – and understand the level that they want to be spoken at.

• Use plain language – write in simple words that your target audience can relate to. Avoid using technical terms that they are not familiar with – and if you do have to use them, then explain them
• Active or passive voice? Use an active voice that engages your visitors – it helps you to sound positive and informative, whereas a passive tone of voice can make you sound weak and unsure of yourself or your product
• Consistency – use the same language and tone throughout your page and website. Switching will only make your audience confused and disassociate with you and your product/service

Remove conversion blockers – ensure your forms are easy to fill out

Wherever you include your form, be it on the landing page itself as an embedded form, or on a separate contact page, it’s important to ensure it doesn’t become a blocker to your visitor making progress down your conversion funnel.

• Short and succinct – keep your form as short as possible – only ask for the information that you need at this moment. If you need more information then incorporate it into a user journey after you’ve captured their initial details. This could be as part of a welcome email journey, a pre-qualifying follow up form or a prospect meeting.
• Clearly labelled – there is nothing worse than a form without clear labels or descriptions. Make it clear to your visitors what you’re asking for.
• Correct input types – input types are how we tell the form what the field is looking for, e.g. text, number, checkbox. Using the right input type can help the user experience immensely, especially with number boxes on mobile devices (where the device will auto-change the keyboard for a number pad.
• Flag errors as they fill the form – use inline validation to flag any errors or requirements in the form, so the user can correct them as they go, rather than waiting till they click the submit button
• Be clear as to next steps – inform your visitors about what will happen once the form is filled in – for example will they receive an email, instant download or a phone call from your team?
• Be mobile friendly – make sure that your form is easy to fill out on a mobile device

Consistency – keep your page branding, style and layout in line with the rest of your website

Even if you use a different platform or website for your landing page – for instance, Hubspot, SendInBlue or another CRM system, ensure that it fits with the rest of your website by aligning to your branding, design and language (tone of voice), all of which will help your visitor to be comfortable and reassured that they are still on your website.

• Use consistent branding – ensure your logo is the same orientation, size etc, use the same colour scheme and typeface throughout the landing page and website.
• Use consistent language – use the same tone of voice for all your landing pages
• Use consistent design – cascade the same navigation content and style – unless your landing page is part of a purchase process where you might choose to remove distracting navigation elements. Keep headers, images and layouts the same.
• Test that you’re staying consistent – check your landing page across devices and against other webpages on those devices. Are all your headers the right size? Are your images sized properly?
• Maintain messaging style – by using the same messaging and marketing approach across your website pages, you’ll help your visitors feel confident and trusting about the content

Need help with your landing pages?

With everything else on your to-do list checking your landing pages to ensure they are optimised for conversion can be one thing too many.

I offer a range of services to help with your conversion rate optimisation, from landing page reviews through to full website audits.

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