Common landing page mistakes that can sabotage your conversion rate
October 28. 2020
At first glance, it might seem quite easy to create a landing page. You post only the necessary info and post witty content about why people should hire your services or purchase your products. Nothing to it, right? Well, not quite. In order to create a decent landing page, there are certain aspects to adhere to and mistakes to avoid. So, to help you with the latter, we are going to cover the top most common landing page mistakes, most of which can sabotage your conversion rate.
The most common landing page mistakes
For those that are new to online marketing, let’s first explain what are conversion rates. In a nutshell, conversion rates are the amount of traffic that goes from simple visitors to paid customers (they convert). It should be fairly obvious that the better your conversion rates are, the better online traffic you will have as a higher percentage of your visitors will end up spending money on you. Therefore, not only do you need to track your conversions, but also ensure that their rate is high. And, to help you keep your conversion rates at an all-time high, let’s cover the dos and the don’ts of landing pages.
Bad CTA
Every landing page needs to have at least one CTA. CTA (call to action) is the content of your landing pages that directly asks your visitors to purchase your product or hire your services. The most common CTA’s are:
- Call now.
- Learn more.
- Hire us.
- Book us now.
- etc.
Now, the common mistake that people make is to either forget to put a CTA, or to put it in an obscure place. Know that your landing page is your most visited page. As most of your customers will come through it, it is a huge waste that they don’t get a CTA while on it. A surprising number of them simply won’t pay enough attention to call on your services. So, do them a favor and place your CTA in a prominent, easy to read place.
Unclear conversion forms
In order to actually spend money on your website, your customers will need to fill out some kind of form. Whether it is to hire your services or to purchase a product, they will need to type in certain info. Well, as it turns out, unclear conversion forms are the graveyards for conversions of customers that are interested, but not sure of your business. If they need to spend unnecessary time filling out unclear forms, they will soon rethink their decision. This usually leads them away from your website, and therefore from spending money on it. The point when they decide that they want to do business with you should be as close as possible to them actually doing so. So, try your best to create an easy to fill, clear to read form for conversion.
Poor website design
You’d think that in today’s day and age it would be easy to design a decent website. But, even a modest Google search will show you that people are still using poor website design choices. So, to help you avoid them, here are the things that no website should have in 2021:
- Comic sans.
- Integrated music.
- Pop-up windows that cannot be turned off.
- Different fonts on the same page.
- No contact info.
- No services/product section.
- Clearly amateur art content.
- An abundance of content on each page (including landing).
- Dead links on the landing page.
Things such as these will drive any person away from your website, even if they were interested in doing business with you. This is why it is usually best to hire a professional to design your website for you and avoid making poor design choices altogether.
Bad website performance
Another reason to hire professionals is to keep the performance of your website at a decent speed. Know that even a simple website can become slow and unresponsive if not updated regularly. And the more complicated your website is, the easier it is for its performance to drop. There can be various different reasons for performance drops like malware, new plugins, or poor optimization of new content. With all of this in mind, the best thing to do is to hire a professional to maintain your website for you.
Just know that the modern customer won’t stand for a slow website. Even if you have what they are looking for, they will leave your website if it is slow on unresponsive. So, in order to avoid losing customers over trivialities, do yourself a favor and hire a professional. In the long-run, they will be well worth the money spent.
Subpar mobile optimization
The final of our surprisingly common landing page mistakes that people make is subpar mobile optimization. When creating websites, most people think that their visitors will see them as they do. Which is through the screen of a computer. But, in actuality, a large number of your customers will use mobile platforms to visit your website. So, if your landing page is only optimized for customers with a mouse and keyboard, you are bound to displease the ones using mobile devices.
The solution here is to build your website with mobile platforms in mind. Here, again, a good web designer will be of huge help. Almost all of the mistakes that we’ve mentioned is something that they are quite familiar with. So, the sooner you involve them with your project, the more of them you will avoid. Just ensure that your website is mobile-friendly and that its programming is optimized for various mobile platforms.