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

The success of your blog rests on your landing pages. Also 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.

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.

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.

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