SharePeople have a short attention span and lead busy lives, so if your landing page doesn’t meet their needs and direct them towards your goal quickly, you have lost them for good.
So In the first 3 to 8 seconds of a visit, your landing page should be able to answer the following 3 questions.
1. Where am I?
2. What can I do here?
3. Why should I do it?
You can spend a fortune on directing traffic to your site but if your landing page isn’t doing its job, that traffic and money spent acquiring it is wasted. The great thing is that optimising your landing page costs little or nothing and yet has the potential to increase conversions exponentially. Increasing the effectiveness of your landing page will dramatically improve your results, without spending any additional money on promotion.
Below are 7 common landing page faux pas to avoid:
1. No Calls to Action (CTAs) or a lack of convincing CTAs
If a visitor arrives on your page and doesn’t know what to do when they get there; they are going to leave pretty quickly. Clarity is not only vital, but it trumps persuasion.
2. Too many CTAs and exit points
Too many things to do, elements such as side navigation or lots of links to other pages can confuse a visitor. If they can’t make up their mind where to go next, they are likely to hit the back button and you’ll have lost them.
3. Overwhelming lead capture forms
You don’t want to make filling out a form a chore. Too many fields will put people off immediately. People are busy and have short attention spans meaning that if you make something too hard and time consuming, they are going to give up. People are also very security conscious and do not like to give away too much personal information, it can be intimidating and a little alarming. Keep things simple. Remember KISS (Keep It Simple, Short)
4. Difficult to read pages
If a page has too much text, too many images or both, visitors are going to lose patience when searching the page for the information they actually want. Clutter is going to distract from your CTA and is going to send people away in frustration.
5. Distractions from the landing page
Flashing banners and audio are very distracting, not to mention irritating. If your visitor is distracted, they are not going to reach the goal on the page and you are going to end up with very high exit rates. Some Advertising networks would even penalise you if people bounce off your page as soon as they land.
6. Pages that don’t look credible
People are wary of their safety online, so if your page looks like a scam or makes outrageous claims, they’re going to head elsewhere. Visitors want to be reassured that the interaction and be sure that their personal information is safe.
7. Pages that take too long to load
Slow loading pages/sites are a major killer of conversions. Most people are busy and will not sit around waiting for a page to load like in the old days of dial up. If your page is taking too long to load, the visitor will hit the back button and do another search.
Landing page performance is a key element of running a successful search marketing campaign. If you want to get your landing pages optimised and working harder for your business, please contact us today.