Small Business Guide to Building High Converting Landing Pages

Want to know how you can generate more sales leads through your website? A high converting landing page is the answer.

Easier said than done—creating highly effective landing pages requires more than what you may think. For a landing page to be effective, it goes well beyond designing a webpage, filling the text boxes with content, and adding calls to action.

So what does it take to create a high converting landing page? How do you structure it? And how do you evaluate if your current landing pages are effective?

This guide answers all those questions and walks you through some key elements you should consider when creating landing pages. Here you’ll learn how to build exceptional landing pages that boost online sales, generate more leads, and generate more ROI.

What is a Landing Page?

Simply put, landing pages are stand alone web pages designed specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign. Unlike standard web pages, landing pages are built with a single goal or focus – known as the call-to-action.

What makes high converting landing pages different from all other webpages is they’re highly targeted, goal-oriented, and focused. They’re crafted for converting maximum visitors into leads or customers.

A landing page is where your target audience takes direct action and accepts an offer. This could be signing up for a free trial, enrolling for courses, registering for an event, buying a product, downloading ebooks, or making calls to fix appointments.

Here’s a snippet of a great landing page we just created for the sole purpose of offering my Become Your Own Boss book for Free.

How to Create Landing Pages that Convert

Many small business owners invest a significant amount of time and resources in creating landing pages hoping that they will convert. And often what happens is they end up spending more on ads for the clicks than the value they generate.

To make sure that doesn’t happen to you, here are strategies that you want to include the next time you are creating a landing page.

1. Make the Page Design Impressive

Your audience spends only about 50 milliseconds deciding if they want to stay on the page or not. According to the Google Research report, the first impression of a website matters greatly to the point where people form opinions based on it. And good website design can help you capture user interest.

Some design elements you’ll want to consider are keeping a simple layout, using larger size font for emphasis, and using alluring imagery. By investing your resources in enhancing the visual appeal, attractiveness, and aesthetics, you can convert more traffic.

2. A/B Split Test Your Landing Pages

According to a HubSpot report, 17% of marketers use A/B testing on their landing pages to improve conversion rates. A/B testing is a way to experiment with two or more variants of a landing page and gather inputs to analyze which variant performed best. This data empowers you to take data-driven steps for improved results.

Sometimes even with A/B testing, companies fail to generate the desired number of conversions. Peep Laja suggests choosing a large sample size for the A/B testing and giving it the required duration if you want to generate maximum value from it.

3. Make Use of Videos

When it comes to video landing pages, many marketers are still not utilizing this option. Yet having a video can up landing page conversions by 80%. Research also shows that short videos of up to 30 seconds perform better when it comes to engagement. 

Make your videos compelling enough that your audience wants to watch them over and over. At the same time, remember that you are looking to gain their trust.To do this, keep the most valuable information at the beginning without making your audience wait. 

4. Go for Responsive Design

Do you create landing pages that automatically adjust themselves to cater to users on multiple devices like android phones, iPhones, tablets, and desktops? If not, you are probably losing out on conversions.

Responsive and adaptive web design for landing pages automatically adjust to the viewers’ screen resolution and thus, help you attract and convert 67% more traffic.

Here’s a great example of responsive design from Dropbox:

5. Dedicate Separate Landing Pages for Each Type of Campaign

Each marketing campaign—whether organic or paid—is unique and has different conversion goals and a different dedicated audience. Thus the overall design and content structure are likely to differ from one another. For example, you may want to keep separate landing pages for your traffic coming through email marketing campaigns and social media ad campaigns.

The key is to deliver the right message to the right people using the right words. That’s why you shouldn’t send all your traffic to one landing page. Instead, create separate landing pages for each campaign. This not only generates more value but helps you stay focused and collect accurate data that you can use for future campaigns.

6. Minimize Distraction

A high-converting landing page always has a single conversion goal. This helps you stay on track and minimize other distractions that can potentially harm your campaign and cost you more money. 

Resist the urge to add irrelevant links on your landing page. Minimize site navigation. Too many different offers and calls to action will just overwhelm your page visitors. This is why on most occasions, marketers use stand-alone landing pages for optimizing conversions.

7. Use Heatmaps

A heatmap is a great way to visualize user interaction on landing pages. It uses color spectrums to represent graphical data and helps you gather valuable insights to user actions. By implementing heatmaps to your A/B split tests, you can easily identify gaps in your page that are hurting your business.

Below is an image from Neil Patel’s Crazy Egg to give you an idea of how heatmap helps you understand audience interaction with a page.

With heatmaps, you’ll know better if your audience is clicking CTA buttons, or trying to click something else that’s not clickable, and how they’re interacting with the page. These insights are extremely useful to analyze the effectiveness of the page designs and make changes that can improve the conversion rate.

4 Mistakes That Can Hurt Your Landing Page Conversion Rate

Now that we’ve covered what you should be including on your landing page to help with conversions, let’s look at common mistakes you’ll want to avoid.

1. Using Too much Text

Text volume of the landing page can immediately impact sales because using too much text unnecessarily adds complexity and confuses your audience. Avoid overwhelming visitors with too much content.

2. Offering Unnecessary Navigation

Navigation links are unnecessary for standalone ad landing pages. They can distract visitors and move them away from the conversion page. So try to avoid them at all costs.

3. Not Leaving Enough White Space and Poor Typography

Don’t make your page look cluttered or difficult to read. Feel free to generously add empty white space for the sake of better readability. Couple this with flawless typography to make it easier for your audience to focus, read, and comprehend without noise.

4. Not Optimizing Page Load Speed

According to Unbounce’s Page Speed Report, 45.4% of consumers are less likely to make a purchase on slow-loading sites whereas 36.8% won’t return to the site.

Consider improving the site speed if you want to build pages that convert and improve your brand reputation.

Building high converting landing pages isn’t impossible but it sure isn’t easy. It takes consistent effort, openness to experimentation, an analytical mind, and an eye for detail. If you follow these suggestions and best practices, you’ll be on your way to better conversions.

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