Your Landing Pages Can Make or Break Your Business
Conversion Optimisation

Your Landing Pages Can Make or Break Your Business

25th February 2020

There was a time when a website was a static creature, created only to showcase products or services and nudge visitors towards getting in touch. 

Fast forward a few short years and our websites are living, breathing beings requiring regular updates to keep them relevant. The most important parts of any website are its landing pages. 

Yep, you heard that right – pages, plural. In the olden days that we just mentioned, your website would have one main landing page with which to grab your customers’ attention.

These days, businesses are advised to have between 10 and 15 in order to achieve the desired conversion rates.

Landing Pages Close Rate

Needless to say, for the smaller business, this is an incredibly time-consuming endeavour – and an expensive one if outsourcing. 

Are landing pages really that important?

In a word, yes.  In 2020, your landing pages can make or break your business – they really are that important.   These vital pages perform a number of functions including: 

  • Supporting your business goals
  • Increasing your conversion rates
  • Generating data and insights
  • Growing your contact and customer lists
  • Increasing your credibility
  • Improving brand awareness

For most of your customers and potential customers, a landing page is the first glimpse of your business and you have mere seconds to grab their attention before they go clicking away from your site.  As we said, they really are that important!

What kind of landing pages do I need?

“Each of your landing pages exist for a specific reason”, says Tim Paige at his podcast with Brand24 “How Your Landing Page May Bring Success”. 

Reasons can include making a sale, growing your email list, showcasing your products or sharing your content.  Each of these reasons (and more) needs its own landing page in order to stop the message becoming diluted and confused. 

It goes without saying that you’ll want a landing page for your sales and one for your products but, there’s a lot more to landing pages than that.   The following is a guide to the other important landing pages that your website probably needs right now: 

An Email Opt-In Page

Opt in Bando example

One of the main reasons that you have a website is to gather contact information for customers and potential customers.  With the new rules on gathering data in place, you now need to have a customer’s permission to email them.

For this reason, it’s essential that you have an email opt in page where they can do just that.  For this page to be successful, you need to include the benefits of opting in as well as hinting that they will be ‘missing out’ if they don’t.

Instead of ‘Subscribe Now’, try something a bit more grabby like ‘Send me great stuff now!’

Thank You / What’s Next Page

dogster thank you notification example

So, you’ve persuaded your visitor to opt in to your emails, now what?  Firstly, remember your manners and say thank you and, secondly, it’s now time to reel them in. 

A Thank You / What’s Next landing page allows you to acknowledge the new subscription and, also, to engage the visitor further. 

On this page, you might want to include a special offer or promotion as a thank you for subscribing; making this page a subtle way of making a sale. 

Start Here Page

Elle & Company

Visitors will be heading to your site from all directions and for different reasons. 

If a potential customer lands on a page which doesn’t interest them, they’ll soon be taking off to another site.  Make sure that you have a standard ‘Start Here’ page which clearly lists the different sections of your website to make it easy for visitors to see what they came for. 

Social Visits Page

Chances are that a number of your site’s visitors will be winging their way to you from your social media sites. 

Many brands make the mistake of assuming that, in this case, sending them to the Home Page will do the job but this is lazy and often ineffective. 

In order to harness the power of your social media, you need to create a landing page which mirrors the content on your Facebook or Twitter and is then followed by a call to action such as an email subscription. 

Content Page

If you’re including content such as blogs or articles on your site – and you’re directing visitors to your site based on that content, listen up. 

When a visitor from social media or forum sees some of your content online and is interested enough to follow up, they don’t want to then land on your sales page. 

To keep these visitors engaged, you need to make sure that they land on a page which contains more of the great content that attracted them in the first place.

Create a dedicated landing page to showcase your content and populate it with catchy titles and images – you can always add links to your products or sales pages within the content. 

Unsubscribe Page

Adidas example

Sometimes a visitor will subscribe to emails and then quickly realise that it’s not for them.  In these cases, there’s nothing more annoying than continuing to receive tons of unwanted emails from a site. 

Although the visitor has opted into your emails, that doesn’t mean that you own them. Every website should have a dedicated Unsubscribe Page to allow leavers a way out. 

On this page, you can ask if the visitor is sure that they want to opt out and, maybe include an incentive to stay. 

Turning the page

With the above in mind, there’s a lot to think about when designing a landing page. 

As well as making sure that it’s SEO optimised, you’re going to need to make sure that it also has the following: 

  • A killer heading
  • An equally killer subheading
  • Trust signals
  • Mobile friendly activation
  • Symmetry with PPC adverts

Landing pages to beat the brands

This, of course, brings us to the actual creation and maintenance of your landing pages. 

At the moment, you’re no doubt thinking about the time and cost that’s likely to be involved in putting together all of those pages – and with good reason.  

Successful brands spend between $75 and $3000 on a well designed landing page – a figure which would make a serious dent in any budget.

With the cost of landing page design soaring, a lot of businesses are going for a more budget-savvy option; the ready made landing page. 

Landingi

The what, you say?

It’s not just marketers who are waking up to the importance of multiple landing pages; it’s designers and marketing solution providers too. 

Enterprising suppliers are now offering ready made landing pages for websites, social media and e-shops which are ready to rock in minutes.

In comparison to the costs mentioned earlier, these customisable, ready made landing pages are a fraction of the price and, some are even free.  In most cases, users simply need to register with a site, pick a template, customise it and be on their way. 

Businesses like Marketables have taken this to the next level by providing a range of different page styles to suit every industry and platform, including Instagram. 

Unique and affordable, Marketables connects designers and clients to form first class landing page partnerships. The site offers digital designers a unique opportunity to showcase their skills and find new clients. 

Once registered on the site, designers can choose whether to charge for their templates or offer them up for free to new customers. 

Markettables.com

In the design

Landingi.com

The ready made landing page is looking more and more like the ideal solution for businesses unable or unwilling to spend thousands on generating lots of pages. 

As budgets continue to tighten in 2020, it’s just common sense to swap astronomical bespoke design costs for something that looks just as good but at a fraction of the price. 

Further reading: The 10 Commandments of Local SEO Landing Pages

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Written By
International SEO Consultant, speaker, blogger. Throughout his career, Milosz has been consulting and devising growth tactics for small and start-up businesses, particularly within financial services. His focus areas include link building, technical SEO, and overall digital strategies.
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