Creating a great landing page can turn an average pay per click campaign into a money making machine. So, how can you create a great landing page that will perfectly compliment your marketing campaign and skyrocket your sales?
There are five key components to any great landing page:
1) Keywords
What Is Keyword Research?
Keyword research encompasses both audience and industry research and is a highly crucial step in creating a great landing page. When conducting keyword research you will be identifying search terms and phrases (a.k.a. keywords) that your target audience commonly use when searching for the product or service you provide.
Once you have established the most frequently used search terms that people are using when searching for the products/services that you provide, you can create a landing page that is specifically designed to meet their needs.
How To Do Keyword Research
There are many free online tools available that can be used to perform keyword research such as Google’s Keyword Planner and Moz’s Keyword Explorer. When conducting keyword research you should be looking for search terms with high monthly search volumes that are highly relevant to your products and services.
To get started, create a list of each product and service you offer and input them into Keyword Planner. This will give you a list of related keywords including their monthly search volumes. You can also use tools such as SEMrush to find out which keywords your competitors are targeting, as you will likely want to be targeting these as well.
For a comprehensive explanation of how to perform keyword research click here.
2) Page Title
The page title is one of the most important visual elements of any landing page as it is usually the first thing that users will see after clicking through to the page.
If the header of your landing page includes a compelling offer that is created to appeal to your target audience, users will be much more likely to continue reading through the page and convert.
However, one of the most important things to do when creating the title for your landing page is to ensure that it reflects the title of the ad that the user clicked on. For example, if the user clicked on your ad promoting 20% off of sleeping bags, the title of the landing page that they are taken to should include mention of that offer.
This builds trust, because if that user were to click on your ad only to be taken to a generic sleeping bag landing page with no mention of the 20% discount, they are likely to bounce back to the search results page. Plus, when the title of your ad reflects the header on your landing page your quality score will increase, as one of the deciding factors of quality score is the relevance of the ad to the landing page.
3) Body Text
Once you have gained the attention of the user with your eye catching headline, you need to use the main text of the page to convince the user to complete the call to action. Unlike the homepage of your website that is designed to promote and sell all of your products and services, landing pages are specifically made to promote a specific offer, product, or service.
As such, all of the content on your landing page should be completely necessary. If you’re bombarding the user with too much unnecessary information it can distract from the purpose of the page.
The content that you do include on your landing page should be designed to increase conversions. Here are some examples of great information to include on a landing page:
Customer Testimonials
Displaying testimonials of how your product or service has helped someone allows users to visualise how your product/service will help them. Using positive customer reviews on your landing page can also increase trust. In fact, according to a recent study, 72% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more.
Industry Partners
Another way to convince users that your brand is trustworthy is to display the logos of other businesses that you have worked with that they already know and trust. This could be past customers if you offer business to business services, suppliers if you manufacture your own products, or resellers and other businesses that your business has a good working relationship with.
Reflect The Ad
Similarly to how the header of your landing page should reflect the original ad, the main text on the page also needs to be highly relevant to the ad copy. This will increase quality score and reduce bounce rate as you are providing users with exactly what they expected to find based on the content of the ad. You should also use the same keywords in the main text of the page that were used in the header and ad copy.
Key Selling Points
A landing page is a great place to prominently display the key selling points of your product. This allows users to see what benefits your product or service will provide them with, without having to read all of the text on the page. For example, if you have a 100% customer satisfaction guarantee, product warranty, or free delivery service, displaying these selling points may get fence sitting customers over the line.
4) Remove Navigation
The key to creating a great landing page is to guide the user from first click to conversion. Landing pages do this beautifully as they are designed with one goal in mind (usually for the user to complete the single call to action on the page). Removing all unnecessary information is one way to ensure that the user does not become distracted and navigate away from the path to conversion.
In order to streamline the conversion process of the landing page, it is important to remove all navigation that would normally be found on the main website, including the main menu. This ensures that all of the information on the page is relevant to the original ad that the user clicked. Additionally, removing navigation from landing pages increases conversion rate as users are less likely to navigate away from the page and become distracted.
5) Call To Action
All great landing pages should be focused on convincing the customer to complete the chosen call to action, whether that be ordering online, calling the business or completing a contact form. The call to action should be simple, clearly visible and as easy as possible to complete.
To increase the conversion rate of your landing page you could add a small incentive to get fence sitters over the line. For example, if you’re selling turf and a user is sitting on the fence on whether or not to buy, offering a free sample by completing a contact form allows you to simultaneously collect the contact details of a potential customer, and convince potential customers of the quality of your product.
Ensuring that the call to action is visible from every point of the page will also increase conversion rates as the user won’t have to go searching for it once they have found the information that they need.
The easier you make the call to action to complete, the more conversions you will get. This means using click to call buttons, and asking for as little information as possible in contact forms. It can also help to add a disclaimer to the bottom of the contact form to state that you won’t share their contact details without their permission.
To sum up, if you can create a landing page that:
- Is based on comprehensive keyword research
- Has an attention grabbing title
- Prominently displays your key selling points
- Has no distracting navigation menus
- and a single, easy to complete call to action
You’re well on your way to maximising the return on investment from your PPC marketing campaign and skyrocketing your sales.