Jake Rheude — December 3, 2019 If you want to convert on your landing page – sales, sign-ups, etc. – then you need traffic. But if you have the traffic and you’re still not converting, that means there’s a problem with the landing page itself. It’s time to take a critical eye to your page and figure out what is stopping people from traveling further down the funnel.
1. Weak Call To Action
Your call to action might be weak or confusing. What is it you’re trying to get visitors to do? How are you asking them to do it?
Ask yourself, how is the design of your page affecting your CTA? Is it getting lost and blending in with the rest of the content? What’s the tone of your ask – are you being clear and assertive? Are you asking the viewer to do something that is not even related to your goal (for example, redirecting to a different page when what you really want is email signups for your newsletter)? Hone in on your goal for the page and see how you can make it the star.
2. Distracting Links
How many outbound and inbound links do you have on your landing page? If you answered anything other than one, you’re probably distracting from your goal of the page. Once you’ve honed in on that goal, that should become the sole focus of the page, and all the clicks should point there – which means you should only have links that relate to your goal. Save the other links for other pages.
3. Wrong Lead Magnet
This is a classic case of not understanding your audience. You may be offering them something that they just aren’t interested in, which means you need to do some research and figure out what could be more appealing. Are you offering a free ebook to a demographic that would prefer a video tutorial? Is your custom product quiz that you want customers to take simply too long? The lead magnet you’re using may not match your endgame.
4. Too Long, Too Short
The length and information on the page could simply not be hitting that sweet spot of providing just enough information without being overwhelming. You don’t want to overdo it and kill the interest of your leads by making them read a novel to see what you want, but you also don’t want to underdo it and leave them asking questions that should be answered in the copy. See if you can get a fresh pair of eyes to read it over, or compare it with similar landing pages in your niche to see how you compare.
5. Poor User Experience
Think about what users like and dislike to experience when they’re visiting a webpage — needing to spend a lot of time to hunt down what they’re looking for, annoying pop-ups, distracting ads. All of those elements make for a bad user experience. When you’re trying to sell them something, it becomes more important than ever to make sure they have a great user experience, and that means streamlining information, dropping the pop-ups, and sidelining the ads. Anything that would annoy them in their day-to-day browsing experience will discourage them from converting on your landing page.
6. Form is Too Long
A quick questionnaire is one of the best ways to get some information about your potential customers – but you can run into trouble if you try to get too much out of them. You may want to know everything about them, but they won’t want to take the time to fill out your three-page form (plus it probably comes off a little too strong).
Instead, distill your ask into the most important information and basic demographics you need so you don’t turn people away. Better yet, make it almost entirely frictionless by asking for just their name and email – you can entice them with a personalized quiz later.
7. Not Mobile Friendly
If your site hasn’t been updated since 2010 then it is probably turning away a lot of mobile customers. Even really high quality websites can look amazing on desktop but be virtually unusable on mobile. Common mobile browsing issues are small buttons, weird formatting, and missing sliding and flipping features – if your mobile users feel like you don’t care about their browsing experience, why would they care about what you’re selling?
8. Lack of Visual Imagery
Wow, that’s a boring webpage you have there! So much text, so little pictures. There are so many ways you can get creative with visual imagery on your site, from hi-def shots from Unsplash to a short and interesting video. Settle on a clear visual design that makes the user flow naturally down the page to the call to action, and enhances their experience (without distracting from it).
Conclusion
Landing pages can be a tricky balance – you want to give all the necessary information without being overwhelming, make it clear to navigate without being boring, and communicate a clear call to action without being overwhelming (or underwhelming). If you aren’t converting as high as you were hoping, hopefully this list will help you look at your page critically and pinpoint an area or two to play around with.
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