Ever wondered how popular kiosks have the perfect display as if the owners know what their customers want to buy? It’s the same reason why websites with high-conversion rates have the best landing pages. So, as a business owner, ensure the website design services you hire prioritize the same.
Let’s break it down a little more.
Just like a kiosk without an appealing display won’t grab the attention of passers-by, an unattractive landing page won’t attract the attention of potential customers.
So, the question is “What makes a perfect landing page?”
Making the perfect landing page can be a torment shared by most website owners. It’s a known fact that ignoring the visitor’s perspective could lead to a high bounce rate. However, learning the visitors’ psyche and expectations from a website can help increase visitors’ average time spent on the landing page. The key to respecting the visitor’s time is to satisfy their needs most engagingly.
Top 7 Things Visitors Search for in a Landing Page?
Scroll through the points discussed below that tell the ways to charm web visitors with a persuasive landing page.
1. Speed of the Website
One of the most ignored factors that drive away visitors or potential customers from a site is its slow loading speed. For instance, you just saw the trailer of the next Marvel movie and with excitement, you went to a site for booking tickets. Would you wait more than 5 seconds for the booking site to load or move to a different site? That’s why it’s not only about delivering a better product, but also ensuring its rapid delivery.
According to Kissmetrics, around 47% of consumers expect a site to load within two seconds in all its glory. And once the threshold of 3 seconds is crossed, visitors bounce away at an alarming rate. Moreover, speed is a big ranking factor for both mobile and desktop search results. On top of that, mobile page speed has become a priority and the optimal loading time of a website on a mobile that Google looks for ranking is 2 seconds. Hence, if your website fails to load within that time frame, the websites of your competitors may leave you behind in the search result pages. So, make improving your page load speed the top priority while designing your website.
On top of that, it’s important to improve the core web vitals of a site, for it enhances the user experience. Core web vitals comprise FID or First Input Delay, LCP or Largest Contentful Paint, and CLS or Cumulative Layout Shift. They are a set of metrics that enable developers to become aware of how users experience a page. The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a user-centric metric that measures the loading performance. To be in Google’s good books, the LCP score should be within 2.5 seconds from the time the page begins to load.
2. The Headline
Another good practice to follow while designing your landing page is to get the best headlines to grab your visitor’s attention. In reality, the headline can make or break your landing page. Whether you have a stunning web design or a superb explainer video, if the headline doesn’t click, your conversion rate would probably be low.
According to the advertising legend David Ogilvy, “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
Even though it was said decades ago, it’s still the reality today. In other words, you need to be obsessed with nailing the headlines or people might just move to your competitor’s site.
Also, the headlines that do the work lack clutter and are to the point. So make sure that your headlines are short, catchy, and relevant.
3. Is it Easy to Navigate?
The 3 things that visitors want to know when they’re on a website are: ‘Where have I been?’, ‘Where am I?’, and ‘Where else can I go?’ If your landing pages have the right answers to these questions, there is a high chance that visitors will stay on your website for a longer time and probably become your customers. It needs to be understood that users usually lack patience and have little tolerance for a site with not-so-smooth navigation.
Hence, make sure that finding information about your products or services may seem as easy as pie. Place the navigation bar where visitors would expect it, vertically to the left, horizontally along the top, or on the right of your homepage.
4. Mobile-friendly
The online landscape is going through many changes due to a plethora of reasons. One of the reasons is the increasing usage of smartphones and tablets. The number of users turning to smartphones to access information has increased to a great degree in the last five years. That’s why having a mobile-friendly website is crucial to ensuring the visitors stay on your landing page.
Again, when a site doesn’t display well or is difficult to navigate on a smartphone, it will simply turn away any potential customers. You need to ensure that your site is correctly displayed on any digital screen or device where it is being viewed. In the age of smartphones, where people use them to access information on-the-go, offering a user-friendly experience is paramount to keep their attention glued to your landing page.
5. Importance of Images and Videos
The core objective of any web design is to transform visitors into leads. For this reason, adding images and videos is significant as they boost engagement and conversion rates. Using images that engage with the users’ emotions and direct them to the important part of your page is crucial. When it comes to the videos, they tell your audience about things they are looking for or help satisfy their needs with ease. Video can increase the average time spent and help earn the trust of the user. If done right, videos can do miracles in improving the conversion rates of a website.
Furthermore, optimizing images and videos is equally important considering its influence on the loading speed of a web page. It offers users a faster experience wherein they can interact with the site seamlessly.
6. Optimize for Search
Although you will be using social posts, email blasts and other marketing methods to drive visitors to your landing page, optimizing them with target keywords for organic search and paid campaigns is equally effective. If someone is searching with your target key phrase, they should end up at your landing page. Simultaneously, the keywords used for paid ads should exist on the landing pages.
Additionally, writing SEO optimized headings and titles is equally important. Including keywords in headings and titles helps Google to crawl a site and ascertain the nature of information before ranking them on search results pages.
7. Compelling Copy and CTA
A landing page that converts well always have the best copy as it contributes a great deal in accelerating the sales process. One of the significant aspects of a landing page copy is that it has digestible bullet points and titles to get across the important topics. Furthermore, the copy should have credibility so that it can earn the trust of a potential customer.
Similarly, never forget that a landing page is incomplete without a clickbait call-to-action. Ensure to put a compelling call-to-action or CTA that will guide potential customers to their desired action. The CTA is key to a converting web page with a directed action-oriented button. Simultaneously, make sure to position your CTA where it can be easily spotted. The last thing you would want is a potential customer leaving your site because your CTA was hard to find.
Conclusion
Landing pages don’t have to be a headache. Once you know what your visitors would look for, it’s easy to build a user engaging website with an effective landing page. Although it isn’t an overnight job, ensure to stick with it and remember the points discussed above. Further, do research and spend time analyzing the landing pages of top websites to achieve your goal. Remember that as long as you follow the best practices of designing a landing page, you’ll soon get one that converts well.