The Ultimate Cheat Sheet on Landing Page Optimisation

What makes the perfect landing page?

How can you drive traffic to a landing page and then ensure that this traffic converts to sales or sign-ups?

This guide provides the ultimate tips for landing page optimisation, complete with a handy cheat sheet you can refer back to time and time again.

What is a landing page?

A landing page, for marketing purposes, is a standalone web page distinct from your main website. Its sole objective is to convert visitors, whether by building your mailing list, securing sign-ups, or driving sales.

What do you want your landing page to achieve?

Pinpoint your business objective for the landing page:

• Building your mailing list
• Filling a webinar
• Recruiting for a coaching program
• Selling a specific product or service

Identify the single action you want visitors to take, such as signing up for a freebie, making a purchase, or booking an event. This clarity helps streamline your design and message.

Know your audience

Understand who your audience is and what motivates them:

• Who are they?
• What keeps them awake at night in terms of your offerings?
• What benefits will they gain by taking action?

Tailor your landing page to match your message with their needs and preferences.

How Will People Find Your Landing Page?

Don’t send campaign traffic to your website’s homepage; it can be distracting. Instead, consider:

• Long-term ‘Evergreen’ campaigns that rely on organic searches and social media.
• Short-term campaigns that might benefit from Pay Per Click (PPC) or banner ads.

Ensure the headline and design match the ads leading to the page, enhancing consistency and Google’s relevancy score.

SEO considerations for your main heading

You’ll notice that on many landing pages, the main heading sits in an image, which means that – depending on how the image has been optimised – Google may not be able to read the text.

It’s worth bearing in mind that if you have a text-based headline rather than copy embedded inside an image, you can give it a valuable H1 tag, which is one of the most important on-page SEO elements for any web page.

Before designing your landing page, you need to decide whether you’re happy to sacrifice the H1 tag for an image-led landing page. The H1 tag is more important for evergreen campaigns that will rely on some organic traffic and being found in searches long-term. It may be less important for short-term campaigns that are dependent on ads driving traffic to them.

Prioritise your call to action (CTA)

The call to action is arguably the single most important feature of a landing page because whether or not a visitor clicks on it is the measure of how well the page converts.

Make your CTA prominent and clear:

• Position it above the fold.
• Use large buttons and directional cues.
• Ensure the wording is direct and specific. For example ‘Get your free ebook’ will lead to far more conversions than a woolly, unfocused call to action like ‘Go’, ‘Submit’ or ‘Subscribe’.

Eliminate distractions

Remove all unnecessary elements like top menus, sidebars, and auto-play media. Keep the page focused on the single objective.

While we’re on the subject of getting rid of distractions, the visitors who come to your landing page are all busy people. They may also be quite choosy about which companies they give their details to, especially if their inbox is already overflowing. To show your customers that you respect their time and privacy, we would recommend only adding essential fields, e.g. name and email address, to your sign-up/lead capture forms.

Show your products

Use images or videos to demonstrate your product in use, which can help visitors visualise their experience.

Selling a particular product? Consider using images or videos that show the product being used in context.

Promoting a printed book or ebook? Consider showing some preview pages to highlight the quality.

Using video on a landing page

Consider adding a video. Studies show that videos can increase conversions by up to 80%. They also keep visitors engaged longer.

Numerous studies have shown that people tend to stay on web pages featuring videos for longer and, recent research from Wyzowl indicates that 79% of consumers would rather watch than read.

With video, people not only hear the words you say but they form impressions based on what they see. If you can feature real people from your team, for example, or appear in the video yourself, it will help to build trust.

Keep Copy Concise

Ensure your copy is succinct and easy to scan with headings, subheadings, and bullet points. Avoid overselling and misleading promises.

Time-poor visitors need to be able to see and understand the key message at a glance, so use copy elements that make the content easy to scan, such as headings, subheadings and bullet points.

In terms of SEO and the copy on your landing page, you should consider focusing on long-tail phrases rather than competitive keywords that you already use elsewhere on your site. Long-tail phrases can help you attract visitors who are directly looking for what your campaign offers.

Social proof

Include testimonials and social media sharing buttons. Real testimonials can reduce fear and build trust.

One of the biggest barriers to selling a service or product is fear. Each time someone connects with a new company as a consumer, they are taking a risk, paying over hard-earned cash – or their contact details – to an unknown quantity. If a landing page can break down the barrier of fear by showing that other people have clicked on the call to action and benefitted from it, you should see a rise in conversions.

Remove risk

Offer guarantees or free trials to remove risk and make the decision easier for visitors.

Tactics such as a 100% money-back guarantee if a person isn’t satisfied with their purchase or an instalment plan for paying can convert well. You could also consider offering a seven-day free trial or something along those lines.

Long landing pages

If you use a long landing page, place the CTA at strategic intervals. Use directional cues to guide visitors down the page.

Segmenting your traffic

Many businesses choose to create several versions of their landing pages with slightly different URLs. This is so that they can segment the traffic and send people to separate landing pages that have a slightly different message tailored to how they found the page, e.g. an AdWords campaign, a search engine, email, social media, or banner ad). You might also want to segment your traffic by user type/gender so that you don’t send men to a page about cellulite treatments, for example.

Segmenting by traffic source is a great way to measure which traffic source is proving to be the highest converting and most profitable with the best return on your investment (ROI).

Review, refine and repeat

Regularly review your landing page content. Use A/B split testing to determine the most effective elements and optimise for conversions.

Does everything support that single purpose that you identified before the page was designed? Remove any words or images that don’t fit with this single focus.

Spend some time proofreading the page, as even the most stunning design can be let down by a typo. Can you say what you want to say with fewer words?

The five-second test

Did you know that any web page has just five seconds to grab a visitor’s attention? The same goes for landing pages. To make sure that yours passes the five-second test, ask some friends, family or colleagues who haven’t been involved in creating the page to look at it for just five seconds.

• Can they tell you what the purpose of the page is?
• Do they understand what’s on offer?
• Could they find the call to action?
• Did they understand what they needed to do?
• What stood out to them?

If they can’t answer those questions easily, you will need to revise the design and/or content.

Ultimate Landing Page Cheat Sheet

For a printable version of our Ultimate Landing Page Cheat Sheet, click here. How many boxes can you tick?

By following these tips and regularly testing and refining your landing pages, you can achieve higher conversion rates and better ROI from your marketing efforts.

Please note: this post has been updated for 2024