5 Common Landing Page Mistakes You Need To Watch Out For and Avoid

“Everyone makes mistakes” is an excuse that just doesn’t cut it anymore. Especially in this day and age when you have everything you need to make a great website available at your fingertips.

Your website or blog may have various content types with the highest conversion rates. Still, if your landing page fails to attract the right kind of attention, your visitors may not remain interested enough to even want to go through your content. What a waste.

If you are building a landing page for your business, there are a few things you should watch out for. Don’t make the same mistakes as others and lose potential customers @KevinOcasio

When starting a blog or creating a website, neglecting your landing page can be one of the worst mistakes you’ll ever make.

Your landing page is the first thing that visitor see as soon as they access your main URL. Vamping it up is just as important as optimizing your WordPress database.

What good are speed and performance if your landing page fails to make your visitors stay and explore your website?

So then, here’s a list of the common mistakes people make on their landing pages, and what you need to do to either fix or avoid them:

1. Too Little or No CTAs

Your website has one true goal: to turn as many of your visitors as possible into subscribers, customers or clients.

To achieve that, you need clear and fetching CTAs or calls to action. Your content marketing strategies, visuals, well-thought-out slogans and other landing page elements are as good as nil if you fail to initiate conversions using your CTAs.

Excellent CTAs have three important factors:

Visibility

Your calls to action should be the first the draw your visitor’s attention. You can use heat map tools and plugins like Crazy Egg, Mouseflow, and Lucky Orange to record the areas where users click on your website. Place your CTA on the part of your website that usually gets the most clicks.

Distinction

CTAs should be the most prominent part of your page content. Use bright colors and solid fonts that contrast with the rest of the colors on your site’s general design. Just be careful and keep from overdoing it to the point that it becomes an eyesore. You can also add animated elements to make it look more striking. Again, moderation is key. Do not overuse.

Clarity

More than the design, fonts, and colors you use, the purpose of your calls to action should be clear and direct to the point.

Do not blindside your users by using generic or ambiguous phrases. For example. Avoid using overused expressions like “click here” or “buy now” as those are more effective in turning your visitors away than attracting them.

Whether it’s to sign up for a newsletter, buy a product that you sell, send contact information or subscribe to a mailing list, your CTA’s text should clearly state what the user should expect upon clicking the action button.

2. Design that looks disinteresting or haphazardly done

If first impressions last, then it’s your responsibility to ensure that your landing page makes a good one.

Your visitors will start just judging your site from the first second it loads up. In which case, an aesthetically-pleasing, uncluttered design is your best bet at attracting users and making them stay.

Make sure that the design elements and visuals that you use for your landing page lean towards eye-candy instead of eyesore.

On the other hand, there are two rules you must always consider in designing your website’s landing page.

First: design equals function, not art.

That means you need to find the middle ground between a good design and a highly-useful one.

Next, your landing page’s content should be short and concise and should empower your users to make well-informed decisions without the burden of too much thought.

Simply put, don’t make them think too much.

Areas you need to focus on are: 

• Primary CTA – the main action you need your visitors to make (subscribe, buy, sent contact details, etc)
• Headline – keep it short and simple.  If applicable, add a countdown timer, expiration date, etc. to create a sense of urgency
• Product or Service information – again, brevity is key. Stick to the important details. Play up your product’s or service’s value. Focus on how these can help your audience achieve their goals.
• Visuals – use images but be discreet. As much as possible, use custom images that distinctly express your point. Used correctly, they can even raise your conversion rate by up to 35%. You can also get images from free anti-stock photo sites. This is as opposed to using stock images which may not properly stand for what you want to express.

3. Off-beat Messaging

Your site’s landing page should match the expectations you set in your SERP title, links, and metadata.

Not doing so will render your business liable to lose valuable customer trust. This will, in turn, adversely affect your marketing efforts. High bounce rates, low-quality scores and retargeting are just some of the ways how losing your customers’ trust can hold you back.

What you need to do:

• Never advertise features that your product doesn’t have.
• Don’t advertise services you can’t adequately provide just for the sake of getting attention.
• If you have any special deals or offers you do need to advertise, make sure to reinforce them at the top of your landing page.
• There will be times when you’ll need to mention specific services or product features. If so, make sure to also explain them briefly on your landing page.

4. Conversion Process Inefficiency

Over-the-top sales conversions are every entrepreneur’s wildest dream. Unfortunately, dreams rarely come true the way we want them to.

The one thing you need to do then is to make sure that you do not contribute to your loss of sales by making your conversion process too complicated. Even if you have a good content marketing guide, a long, complicated sales process is a sure-fire way to keep customers away.

Here’s what you need to remember:

• Customer information is gold. Ask for them only when necessary. For example, you don’t need to ask for their physical address if you just want them to try out your latest software. An email address will more than serve that purpose.
• Keep the conversion steps as quick and easy as possible. Concentrate as many important actions on your landing page. These include account creation, subscribing to emails lists or newsletters, downloading files, etc. If necessary, include an easily visible link to your download to Google Play, Microsoft’s Store or Apple’s App Store.

5. Tracking and optimization process that’s so blah

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your job is done as soon as your website is up and running.

You still have the obligation to keep on tracking your site’s progress and making adjustments based on its strengths and weaknesses.

This is especially true with your landing page.

Overlooking the optimization of your landing page can be detrimental to your conversions and overall click-through rate.

To make the most of any opportunity you can to turn your audience into conversions, do these things:

Use Google Analytics or similar alternatives to monitor your page.

Set metrics and conversion goals to track the effectiveness of your sales process. Your landing page, ads or some other element of your website are factors for your site’s success or failure.

Tools like Google Analytics will help you pinpoint those strong and weak post. You can then make adjustments accordingly.

Always strive for better SEO.

Complacency is your worst enemy as far as SEO is concerned. Never be content with what’s “good enough”.

Optimize your landing page based on insights you can gather from your analytics. Fix issues like poor site performance, poor link-building tactics, and other factors that ruin organic traffic. Even if you’re doing well conversion-wise, there’s always something you can do to make it even better.

TL;DR

Maybe you had very little time on your hands so you only managed to skim through the article. Don’t worry, we understand. But hey! We don’t want you to miss out on the key points and risk making any of these landing page mistakes.

Here’s a brief recap of the things you need to make sure on your landing page.

• Input sufficient calls to action on your landing page. You want as much response from your users as possible. Your CTAs should be visible, distinct and clear.
• Your landing page design should look like it involved lots of time and effort in the making. Its content should be short, concise and informative. Use images and visuals to attract more attention.
• The title, link, descriptions, etc. of your website should match your landing page’s content. Deliver the exact expectations you give to your customers.
• Develop an effective conversion process. Don’t over-complicate it to prevent users and customers from losing interest.
• Track and optimize your landing page and website on a regular basis. Make changes and adjustments as necessary based on your analytics results.

And there you have it. We’d love to have your thoughts on the matter as well. Please feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below. Any insights you have will be highly appreciated. Kudos!

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