A landing page can be one of the most valuable tools in your marketing arsenal.
These standalone pages are expressly created for a singular purpose—converting paid traffic into leads. But they’re only effective if they’re properly designed, deployed, and utilized.
All too often, brands make simple mistakes that dramatically reduce the landing page’s potential impact. Fortunately, many of these are easily avoidable. You just need to be aware of them.
To that end, here are four landing page mistakes you should prepare for.
#1 Unfocused Landing Pages
Having multiple call-to-actions is a common mistake brands run into. They try to do too much, which creates dissonance, especially if CTAs encourage the visitor to perform different actions.
A landing page should be designed to encourage the visitor to take one specific action. Only one. It’s up to you to decide what that action will be. Maybe it’s providing contact information, signing up for a newsletter, or making a purchase.
A site visitor should never finish reading the page and be left wondering, now what?
Instead, a strong landing page will serve as a clear and explicit call to action that tells the visitor exactly what you want them to do.
#2 Bland Landing Page Copy
Copy is the essence of every content strategy. If it falls flat, your other efforts will likely follow suit. Common copy issues on landing pages include:
- Grammatical, spelling, and formatting errors
- Lack of whitespace
- Weak headlines
- Meandering sentences
- Too much copy
- Paragraph chunks
Landing pages should be simple and concise. Your goal is to guide the reader’s eyes down the page to the CTA.
As you write the landing page, be sure to make it scannable, get right to the point, emphasize your value proposition, and remove distracting clutter. Vary your sentence length and paragraph structure. Also, break up content with bullet points.
#3 Not Enough Landing Pages
Even if your end goal for two landing pages may be the same, it’s still a mistake to create a universal landing page. A Hubspot Marketing Benchmark on 7,000 businesses discovered a clear correlation between the number of landing pages and the number of leads a business generated.
Put simply, more landing pages resulted in more leads.
Potential consumers may be arriving at the landing page who are at different stages of the buyer’s funnel. Or, they could be from an entirely different customer segment, which means they are dealing with dissimilar pain points or may resonate with a certain type of messaging.
By making a general landing page, you miss out on its most valuable characteristic—flexibility. Landing pages can be tailored to a specific audience and personalized in a way that elevates a static homepage.
To avoid this mistake, you should create separate, targeted landing pages according to various factors like conversion goals and buyer personas.
#4 Slow Load Times
Few circumstances will make a site visitor click away faster than a slowly loading page.
For landing pages, every second matters. According to Google the probability of a bounce increases 32% if the page load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds.
In the last year, Google has placed extra emphasis on Core Vitals in relation to ranking. If you want the page to perform, your landing page should be aligned with the three aspects of core vitals, with special attention paid to page load times.
Want to speed up your landing page load time? Try these tips:
- Optimize images
- Reduce redirects and HTTP requests
- Minify HTML CSS, and JS
- Enable browser caching
- Use a CDN
Semgeeks a PPC Marketing Agency for You
Even if you have a well-planned Google Ad strategy, it will likely be ineffective if your landing pages aren’t properly designed. While there are dozens of mistakes you should know about and avoid, remember to prioritize the following tips:
- Create a streamlined landing page with a single CTA
- Use compelling copy throughout the landing page
- Make a unique landing page for each ad
- Optimize your page to load quickly
If you want advice on how to drive the most value from each landing page, we can help with that. At Semgeeks, our team of marketing wizards can work with you to design a PPC strategy that places you directly in front of potential customers and then encourages them to act.
Landing pages can be incredibly valuable tools. Let us help you use them the right way.
Sources:
Hubspot. State of Marketing Trends Report 2022. https://www.hubspot.com/hubfs/2022_State-of-Inbound-Marketing-Trends_V712.pdf
Think with Google. Marketing Strategies. https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/page-load-time-statistics/
