The Anatomy of a High-Converting Landing Page

With all the tools available these days, creating a landing page is easy. What’s difficult is creating a landing page that converts. Like a website, a landing page is the sum of its parts, so it’s vital that all the essential elements are represented and that the landing page in its entirety speaks the target audience’s language. If you’re looking to take your landing pages — and your conversion rates — up a notch or two, follow these ten tried and tested tips.

Grabbing users’ attention immediately with a strong headline will give your landing pages the best start possible. But don’t stop there. Follow through with ad copy that complements the headline and sates your prospects’ desire for the offer. An excellent way to present the benefits awaiting prospective customers is to break these down into bullet points. This makes the content more easily digestible and enhances both scannability and readability.  

Also, the headline and content should complement each other, so make sure there’s a logical progression from the headline through to the content and then to the call to action. This consistency and progression is essential for creating landing pages that convert.

Your landing page headlines should be eye-catching and attention-grabbing, as well as easily understood and immediately compelling. Addressing your target audience’s known pain points in the headline is a top tactic as this encourages qualified leads to click on your ads. It will also have the effect of minimising unqualified leads who aren’t ready to act, which is equally important.  

Spelling, grammatical and factual errors will not help to build trust among your prospective customer base. In fact, errors will usually have the opposite effect. Even a small, seemingly minor error can make a notable difference on conversions, so thoroughly checking landing pages for grammatical errors is a must. It suffices to say that a prospective customer’s first experiences with your brand should be error-free.

Following on from the previous point, your landing page is often the first contact that a prospective customer has with your brand, so that experience must be a positive one, an experience that wows. Along with ensuring the landing page is completely free of errors, build trust among prospects with trust indicators, many of which you will have access to.  

Examples of trust indicators include customer testimonials and reviews, guarantee seals (membership in industry organisations, etc.) and third-party security certifications. The increase in conversions that the right trust signals can make on landing pages is remarkable. 

Check out a few articles on the subject and you may be amazed at how changing a call to action (even a single word) can make a significant impact on conversion rates. Once the prospect has read the headline, they should know exactly which action they should take next, so the CTA needs to be aligned with the headline. And it must be strong enough to make the prospect want to act.

If the call to action button blends in with the other elements on the page it won’t pack the punch you want it to. Even strong CTAs that should drive conversion rates heavenward won’t deliver when lost among the other elements, so ensure your call to action buttons stand out.  

Using powerful words and keywords that people may be searching for is a good start, but also consider the placement on the page (see below) and the colour. Distinguishing CTAs from other elements with the use of colour is an effective way to make them stand out.

The fold refers to the space that’s immediately visible when users land on a webpage. This is the space where the most important elements of the landing page (headline, call to action, hero image, explainer video, etc.) should be placed so that they’re clearly visible the moment the prospect lands on the page. Don’t make your prospects scroll down below the fold to take you up on your offer, as there’s every chance they won’t make it that far.  

You know the expression, so why not paint a picture with images and let that picture speak a thousand words? Using images and other visual elements, especially video, is an excellent way of showing your target audience what your product does and the solutions it provides.  

Customer testimonials should be accompanied by images of real people as a means of building trust and any photos of your products should be high-resolution and professional. As poor-quality or low-resolution photos won’t help to build trust, they should be avoided.

Earlier we discussed how your CTAs and buttons shouldn’t get lost among the elements, so take this one step further and keep distractions to a bare minimum. Anything that distracts prospects from acting should be removed, especially unnecessary links that would take the prospect off the landing page.  

The objective with landing pages is to keep the prospect on there long enough to take the action you have in mind for them, so don’t provide them with the means to leave the page.  

Even if it’s a short promotion that you’re pushing, it’s important to incorporate testing into your schedule. A/B tests (also called split tests) are the most effective way to check which elements are resonating with your audience and fuelling conversions, and which aren’t.  

 All landing page elements, from headlines and images to calls to action and ad copy, should be tested as this enables you to find out which work and which don’t. It’s also a good idea to keep a record (use Excel or Google Sheets) so that you can refer to this later and save time when creating future landing pages.

Bear in mind that creating landing pages which convert entails a great deal of trial and error (hence the need for ongoing testing) and that the elements discussed here (images, third-party testimonials, explainer videos, etc.) don’t need to be on every landing page.  

Quick Sprout’s landing page is a great example of a high-conversion landing page that doesn’t feature a video, hero image or a trust seal of any kind, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look for ways to build trust with the landing pages you create. Good luck!