Building a Landing Page: Some Best Practiсes for Converting Traffic

20 min read

A high-converting landing page can be a website’s most valuable asset. Despite how effortless a high quality landing page often looks, a truly effective landing page doesn’t happen by accident. It requires careful planning, design, testing, and execution. When optimized the right way, it can be just as powerful (and profitable) as a live salesperson.

But don’t just stop at one! According to research, the more landing pages you build for your website, the more you can amplify your conversion rates. Most notably, companies see a 55% increase in leads when growing their number of landing pages from 10 to 15.

In this blog post, we’ll walk you through 12 of the most common high-converting landing page best practices. Take a look to see what you’re doing right (or wrong) and make adjustments to make the most out of your conversions.

What Is Landing Page Optimization?

First, let’s get on the same page about what a landing page is. Simply put, it’s a web page, created specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign. It’s where visitors “land” after they click on a link in an email or an ad.

Landing page optimization means that every inch of a landing page is refined in a way to directly or indirectly impact a user’s decision to purchase.

There are different ways to optimize a landing page. You can zero in one or many of the following elements to support your conversion goals:

Page design or page experience
Page copy
Call-to-action (CTA)
Colors (especially button colors)
Other visual elements (embedded videos, GIFs, images)
Interactive elements (pop ups, chatbots, etc.)

To do this right, it’s important to understand your audience. Then, to figure out how you want them to interact with your content on the page. Not knowing your target audience is one of the biggest mistakes online entrepreneurs make when starting out.

Take a quick example from ClickUp, which speaks directly to their target audience, people in the field of marketing, by including marketing-related keywords that they’ll recognize. Even the use of charts likely feels familiar to a marketer.

Source: ClickUp

One way to ensure that you’re targeting the right users is by relying on data to drive your strategy. You can either survey an existing audience right before a landing page campaign launches, or do a search through Google for existing customer studies in your niche.

To get the best results, it’s also important to find out what your audience’s main pain points are, along with what they like, and even what they consume.

12 Landing Page Best Practices to Convert More Traffic

To convert more visitors into paying customers, there are some general landing page best practices to follow. You can use the data from A/B testing regularly, for example, to learn about your prospects’ preferences and advance your conversion rate percentage by percentage.

A well-made landing page will address the audience’s pain points, offer a solution through your product or service, and then use compelling language to encourage them to take action, as in buy your product or sign up for your service.

Let’s review some of the best optimization strategies for your landing pages.

Align Your Goals with Your Landing Page

Ideally, landing page optimization should start with your high-level business goals. Are you looking to gain signups or sales? How much and by when? The more specific you are, the easier it will be to align your goals to the specific language and design of your landing page.

Let’s say you want to reach 1,000 subscribers by the end of the year. In this case, your landing page should revolve around an offer that’s exclusive to new subscribers and will encourage sign-ups above all else.

Once your monetary goals and the landing page’s theme are aligned, you’ll need to connect individual campaign goals to the big picture. This involves setting up both your ads and your landing pages to mirror each other’s language, look, and feel.

Let’s take a look at how SEMrush is keeping the copy and design consistent:

Source: SEMrush Facebook ad / SEMrush landing page

This type of soft repetition is good for conversions. In more scientific circles, they say using consistent word choices and visual clues creates a sense of positive familiarity. Repetition is also one of the simplest, most effective landing page best practices because it creates a feeling of assurance for hesitant users, in giving them something both novel and somewhat familiar.

This tactic is especially helpful for ecommerce landing pages that rely heavily on advertisement-driven traffic and want to make the most of their advertising dollars.

Simplify Your Landing Page

Landing page design matters. Don’t overload your page with too much text or too many distracting visuals, which can overwhelm website visitors.
Follow the simple rule of “less is more.” Use plenty of negative space to help guide the eye towards the page’s most important element: the main call to action.

The most effective landing pages use engaging but subtle visual cues, such as arrows, whitespace, copy alignment, or color contrasting. Following these will keep visitors on the site longer.

For example, Grammarly uses a minimalistic style and contrasting colors to get their main message across.

Source: Grammarly

Even if you’re not too familiar with coding, you can design a landing page with help from a plugin or template.

Keep the Action on the Upper Half of the Page

Visitors are impatient. A study found that internet user’s collective attention spans are decreasing. Therefore, site visitors need to know exactly what your landing page is about right when they land on it.

To do this, you need to ensure that visitors can easily understand what it is they’re supposed to do on your page, and why they should be doing it.
This means keeping the following elements above the fold:

Headline
Sales proposition or description
An image or video
Your main call-to-action button.

For example, you can get the most important question about Wise answered right above the fold: “How much would my transfer cost?” Calculate it with your actual numbers!

They provide a clear value proposition and make their calculator easy to understand and use.

Source: Wise

Use Scarcity Techniques

Even the most seasoned online shoppers get ruffled from headlines that warn of limited supply availability. Scarcity techniques create a sense of urgency and encourage visitors to take action.

Here are some examples:

Limited time discounts. “Our sale ends in 2 days” or “50% OFF through Friday”
Unspecified time left. “Enjoy while it lasts” or “While supplies last”
Limited supply availability. “Only 2 left” or even “Out of stock”
Other users’ purchases. “15 people have already bought” or “5 people are looking at this deal right now”
A visible countdown timer. “1 day 3 hours and 14 minutes left.”

Source: CyberLink

Keep Your CTA Straightforward

Your CTA (call-to-action) should be easy to spot and even easier to understand. Don’t make visitors guess what you want them to do.

The ideal CTA is 1-4 words long and uses simple language to get the message across.

Examples:

“Join”
“Learn More”
“Get Started Now”
“Download Your Free Guide”

You’ll see that the best examples of CTAs follow the few-word rule. That said, there are instances where a CTA can be 5+ words long or even forms a full sentence. This technique can also be effective. You just need to ensure that whatever your CTA is, the style fits your brand.

For example, Convince & Convert is a brand that loves using long-form CTAs.

Source: Convince & Convert

If the main goal of your landing page is to encourage visitors to buy your product, consider using Ecwid’s Buy Button. This button is a shoppable plugin you can easily add to a landing page, blog, or anywhere on your website. By clicking a Buy Button, customers are instantly taken to their cart on your site.

A CTA button on a website selling the Baby Snack Time book

Use Compelling Copy and Headlines

Your landing page’s headline is the first thing your visitors see on your site. So it’s important to make every word count! In general, it’s important to make your landing page copy compelling, clear, and readable.

Here are a few techniques to help you craft effective landing page copy:

Keep your sentences short (20 words or less)
Make your copy easy-to-read (check it with a readability test)
Compose a high-converting headline
Use “you” and “your” to build a personal connection to the readers
Add industry-related words that your target audience will recognize
Try out the AIDA-model or the PAS-model to make your words flow together well
Sprinkle effective “power words” throughout your copy to evoke an emotional response.

If your copy is not clear or engaging enough for your readers, it will be harder to get them to stick around and take action. Before you go live, show your landing page to people who are unfamiliar with your business and gauge their first impressions. Ask them how clear your message is, and if they have a clear understanding of the action the page wants them to take.

Keep Your Landing Page Mobile-Friendly

The mobile-first approach in marketing is no longer optional. M-commerce (mobile commerce) is a billion-dollar industry and growing. Get started with mobile optimization, or miss out on a large number of potential conversions.

Here are a few pointers to keep in mind for making your landing pages mobile friendly:

Design your mobile-ready landing page first and then work backwards to build your desktop page
Make sure your text is large enough to be read on a small screen
Make all buttons and links easy to click or tap
Keep in mind that a longer landing page is OK, as long as you use plenty of whitespace between each element
Use a single-column layout
Do thorough testing of all multimedia (like videos and forms) on both mobile and desktop
Check your load speeds on mobile, and simply your design if you find the page isn’t loading quickly enough.

Make Sure the Page Loads Quickly

People can’t stand slow websites and tend to leave pages that don’t load right away. This means that each second your site takes to load could be additional dollars lost. On top of that, a bad visitor experience can also damage your SEO efforts.

Speeding up your pages comes with some sweet rewards. Vodafone saw an 8% increase in sales after they optimized their Web Vitals. Sounds good, right?

Here are some quick tips for quick-loading pages:

Keep your images small
Avoid running too many scripts
Use a caching plugin
Use a CDN to host your files.

A high bounce rate could be a good indicator of page speed issues. Run a speed test to see specific issues.

Regularly Test and Update Your Landing Pages

Whether you sell digital downloads or run an online store, regularly testing and revisiting your landing page is the ultimate optimization method. Because the only way to know what works and what doesn’t is to test it out.

There are a ton of things you can run an A/B test on:

Landing page copy
Headlines
CTA
Design elements.

Conduct different A/B tests to see which combination results in the highest conversion rate. Try a tool like Optimizely or Google Optimize to run and track your tests.

Tip: test one thing at a time (for example, using a yellow or red CTA) so that your experiment is clear and has no hindering factors that might sway or confuse your results.

Regularly updating your content is also important, because it ensures your page is populated with up to date and relevant information. It also shows that you’re committed to providing the best possible experience for your visitors and encourages frequent site visitors to check in with what’s new.

Add Testimonials to Act as Social Proof

People are more likely to convert when they see that others have had a positive experience with your product or service. That’s where testimonials come in. They provide social proof and increase trust in your brand.

In a recent study, 31% of consumers reported that they read more online reviews in 2020 than ever due to COVID-19.

The best landing pages are ones that can integrate testimonials into the natural flow of the site. For example, adding positive user reviews near the pricing section can help persuade users to convert without making it seem forced.

Including a headshot and the name of the person giving the testimonial can add an authentic, human touch. Having a short, specific quote from the customer that showcases how your product or service has helped them can help convey information on your product without coming off as overly boastful.

Usage of video testimonials is on the rise, and for good reason: video marketers get 66% more qualified leads per year.

For example, the AI software, Jarvis, knows the importance of a human testimonial for their product. They placed this video testimonial just below the fold of their landing page.

Source: Jasper (former Jarvis)

Videos are more engaging than text-based testimonials, and they can help show off your product or service in a direct and attention-grabbing way.

Make Your Landing Page SEO-Optimized

Even if you only use your landing pages to connect to your ad campaigns, you should still optimize them for SEO.

Stats say that 53.3% of total website traffic could come from organic search. Search engine optimization should serve as a long-term investment in your inbound traffic. You don’t need to go overboard, but SEO best practices call for at least some basics:

Use targeted keywords in both your headlines and copy
Create an attention-grabbing title
Add industry-related keywords for your target audience
Optimize your alt tags
Add a meta description
Ensure your URL (slug) is short and simple.

Use tools like Ubersuggest or SEMrush to help find the right keywords to use throughout your landing page. For further ideas, you can look into customer reviews or comments to see how they talk about your product or service.

Don’t Forget to Say “Thank You”

In our world of quick sales and constant remarketing, it’s easy to forget about simple things like saying thank you to customers for their support.

After a customer finishes their checkout, consider creating a unique thank you page with a heartfelt message thanking them for their support. This acknowledgment shows that your business genuinely treats your customers well and is willing to go out of your way to recognize their contribution to your success. Little practices like this can go a long way in increasing customer loyalty.

For example, VPN provider TunnelBear shows off a graphic of a bear, along with a thank you message and some post-purchase reassurance on their thank you page.

They also add a big, bold CTA to their product to move the users along in their journey.

Source: TunnelBear

Here are some additional tips to make your thank you page stand out:

Thank them for their purchase, visit, or sign-up (use big, bold letters)
Explain what will happen next (for example, “Your order has been processed and will be shipped within 24 hours”)
Get ahead of post-purchase aversion and reinforce the main benefit to purchasing (“You’re now secure with our VPN”)
Include a CTA to encourage further engagement (such as a discount for their next purchase or to download the purchased product)
Include social media icons so they can share their positive experience with their friends
Optional human touch: add a personalized message from the founder or CEO, or copy that goes above and beyond a form message.

Start Optimizing Your Landing Page and Get More Conversions

We hope this article has been a helpful resource for learning all about some landing pages best practices. Remember: the best landing pages are the ones that get to the point quickly and seem effortless.

Your goal is to provide potential customers with an easy-to-digest summary of your product or service. They should understand the main message without being overloaded by too much text, graphics, or other elements. Every section on your page should have a strategic purpose.

Many moving parts go into making a high-converting landing page. Following these twelve best practices should help you achieve the results you’re looking for and achieve a better ROI on your next marketing campaign.

Landing pages are a vital part of your advertising campaign, but these days, successful businesses also need a robust online presence. If you don’t have a website or online store yet, set one up with Ecwid’s Instant Site. It’s a free website with a built-in online store. It’s mobile friendly and doesn’t require any coding or design skills to set up.

No matter how you use landing pages to sell online, we wish you the best of luck in your journey!

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Marketing and Promotion

Jan 6, 2022

About the author

Zoe is a content marketing strategist for SaaS brands like FollowUpBoss, Mention.com and more. Bylines: Ecwid, ProProfs, Score, etc. On the personal front, Zoe is a pho enthusiast and loves traveling around the world as a digital nomad. Connect with Zoe at zoedevitto@gmail.com or on her website and Twitter.