Why Your Landing Pages Suck

Why Your Blog’s Landing Pages Suck (and How to Fix Them)

The success of your blog rests on your landing pages. How to Fix Your Awful Landing PagesAlso referred to as sales pages or money pages, their main goal is to convert visitors. Whether your purpose is to increase your email list, turn visitors into customers, or any goal that requires your audience to commit to your desired action, your landing page must fulfill it.

Therefore, if your landing pages are performing below expectations, then you need to do something.

Building landing pages is a process that is entirely separate from tasks typically associated with blogging. Instead of just publishing content, you must deliberately design a page and arrange different page elements for your intended purpose. Due to the difficulty of harmonizing the disparate factors of a landing page, it is easy to make mistakes along the way and achieve low conversion rates on your pages.

However, no problem can't be fixed in your blog. Below are reasons why your landing pages aren't performing up to snuff and some basic ways to set them straight.

Underwhelming headlines

There's nothing more disappointing than a landing page with a very generic headline. Headlines are supposed to excite and prepare your audience about your offer, so if your headline fails to do both, then your landing page is already bound not to convert.

MultiTouch sales page from Core Integrated

In this MultiTouch sales page from Core Integrated, the headline states, “Marketing Simplified!” It doesn't say anything about its services and how it can help its target clients to simplify their marketing. Worse, that is the only text you will read above the fold. There is no further explanation about how this multitouch thing works and doesn't encourage visitors even to learn more about the page.

Fix: Be specific with your landing page headlines. This comes from knowing who and what your audience needs from your blog. More importantly, share the benefit and value that your offer will get if they scroll down and learn more about your services. Your headline should convey these essential factors to get your headline and landing page on the right track. For crafting your headlines, you can use CoSchedule Headline Analyzer so you can see the aggregated score of your headline and improve it even further.

Recommended: 5 Ways To Sharpen Your Headline Writing Skills

Too many goals crammed in a single page

Ideally, you must assign a single goal for every landing page. By zeroing on one goal for your landing page, you can focus on relaying a single message to your audience and fleshing out the details along the way. Having more than one goal may confuse your readers and prevent them from taking action on any goals you may have on your page.

JP Morgan Chase Landing Page

For example, refer to the credit card landing page at JP Morgan Chase & Co. The page title clearly refers to the bank's credit card services. However, looking beneath the credit card offer are links to different pages on the site. The page may have something to do with the initial offer, but it's still not the initial offer, which makes all the difference.

Fix: Simply choose a goal for your landing page and stick with it. Eliminate choices within your landing page and dedicated all your efforts on getting people to commit to that one single goal.

Navigation shows on the page

About limiting your goal on your landing pages to just one, you need to remove other distractions on your page. I'm referring to the menu bar and footer.

Both sections normally appear on all pages of your site unless specified. Assuming that your visitors are familiar with them, they can quickly head to either section if they want to see something else from your landing page. As a result, they might click on any of the links that appear there which have nothing to do with your landing page's goal and stray away from the page. This is particularly the case with the menu bar since it appears on top of your landing page.

Hubspot Landing Page Study

An example that proves why you need to remove both navigation menus is based on a study conducted by Hubspot. By taking out the menu bar and footer from the landing page, almost all of the pages saw significant improvement on their respective conversion rates.

Fix: You need to find a way to remove both sections from your landing pages. By taking them out of the equation, you reduce your bounce rate and back the focus on the desired action of your landing page.

Other tips

Aside from the examples presented above, you need also to consider the factors below when designing your landing page.

  • Craft compelling copy– The kind of words and the tone you use on your copy will decide how your audience with receive your landing page. By understanding your blog audience, you can draft a message and develop a tone and flow that resonates with their wants and needs. For basic guidelines on effective landing page copywriting, read this post at VWO.
  • Play around with CTA button designer– If you want your visitors to click on a call to action (CTA) button, then you need to make sure that it is eye-catching enough to be noticed. The size, color, and text of your button will decide how your audience will interact with it. Learn the kind of CTA button you need for your landing page by reading this Unbounce post.
  • Use social proof – To bridge the gap between your audience and your blog, you need to establish trust. By using social proof like testimonials from influencers, user-generated content, and social shares on your landing page, you can build a case that your blog is trustworthy enough to warrant their attention.
  • Use landing page builders– For non-designers, you can only lean on landing page builders to help you come up with the ideal design for your landing page. Also, builders normally have templates that you can just grab and use for your site so you can focus on the message. For the landing page builders to use on your WordPress blog, head on to this post at WP Superstars for more information.
  • Test and measure– To get the most out of your landing page, you need to test and measure the results using different analytics tools to see areas that you can improve and work on so you can increase your conversion rate even further.

Conclusion

It's okay if your landing page isn't converting the way you want it to. What's important is what you do once finding out that you can improve your landing page conversion rate. By tweaking your landing page about the tips mentioned above, you can be sure to create landing pages your audience will like and that'll convert them into subscribers and customers

14 thoughts on “Why Your Blog’s Landing Pages Suck (and How to Fix Them)”

  1. Amanpreet Singh

    Thanks for explaining it very well. You are right we need to turn “visitors to customers” that’s a great punch. I need to improve my landing page conversion rate. You also said about to make blog or site trustworthy. Yes we have to get trust of our visitors. Thank you very much, i am gonna use your steps now and i hope my blog will much improve from earlier.

  2. gia halliday

    I will definitely put my hand up and admit my headline is very underwhelming.. Primarily because I had absolutely no idea what to put so I just put what came to mind. Funny how you make it seem so simple… describe what I can offer them if they scroll down the page.. So simple! Ha, thanks 🙂

  3. Hi Christopher,
    This is timely for me as I’m thinking of adding one to my site. I didn’t know about the results from Hubspot about eliminating the footer, header and sidebar if you have one. Good advice I can use. Testing is key and setting up goals in Google analytics is soemthing I’ve started to do.
    I would agreeing on having too many objections on one landing page. Too many choices make people back off.
    Thanks for sharing all these tips.

    1. Thanks for commenting, Lisa! Keeping your landing page focused on getting your visitors to commit to your CTA is your primary goal. Therefore, you need to eliminate distractions, if not keep them to a minimum, and really make the page as tight as possible.

  4. Hey Christopher,

    Landing pages are the place where you would want your readers to get engaged. I really hate it when people put more products on the single page.

    It shouldn’t be overwhelming. People need to see the quality instead of the quality. The worst part is about the poor headlines.

    There are many landing page builder available in the market to give you a better design.

    ~Ravi

  5. Monika Sharma

    Hi Christopher,

    Thanks for sharing this wonderful article on Ileane’s blog! You have shared a amazing articel that tell the right value of Landing Pages.

  6. Hey Christopher,

    Willing to read your wonderful informative post and I totally agree with your points. We know very well, our landing page’s main purpose is to generate leads. Headline play vital role when it comes to grab attention of readers.

    People need to understand what you’re offering immediately. You have very nicely discussed this subject and mostly I like your way to fix them. Eventually, thanks for sharing.

    With best wishes,

    Amar kumar

  7. Thank you for the tips, Christopher. Huge help right there. But what if your landing page is the blog page? My rule has always been, the simpler the better. Or how would we make the blog list more interesting?

    Cheers

  8. Thanks Christopher

    You make great points about no confusion – only one thing on the landing page. Writing compelling copy is important too.

    I’ll be implementing these asap. I’m going to be hunting round for landing page builders right now.

    Cheers
    Jan

  9. Sarbjit Singh

    A landing page is still an effective way to increase conversion for your product and services. But most of the companies are unable to produce an effective layout for the landing page. That is why they can not capture leads for their business and services.

  10. Wow, I’ve never given much thought to my landing page and I think the headline is something I formulated on the spot. This post has given me a fresh perspective. Thank you kindly.

  11. Hi, I have a cleaning business which is growing at an ‘ok’ pace but not very much is coming from my website. I pay for google advertising but visitors come and then leave – is there something wrong with my landing page. Is there anything you can see that would increase conversions? thanks in advance

  12. I think it’s crucial to implement some kind of AB testing for your landing pages. It’s amazing the difference makes by just changing one word or the color of a button.

  13. Landing page is an indispensable part of marketing. Creating effective landing pages allows you to target your audience, offer them something of value, and convert a higher percentage of your visitors into leads, while also capturing information about who they are and what they’ve converted on. Thanks Christopher for sharing these tips on how we can improve our landing page.

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