How to Create a Landing Page that Converts

Landing page, target audience, Google Analytics – what do all these have in common? 

They are terms that get thrown around in the online marketing world on a daily basis but can sound like utter nonsense to someone who doesn’t live and breathe digital marketing. 

A landing page is often the first thing a new visitor sees and experiences of your brand and business. It’s the web page that most marketers link to from social media sites, newsletters, and paid ads across the internet.

They are great for quickly communicating your main selling points with your audience, but they also streamline and speed up the overall customer acquisition process. 

If you’re wondering how to create a landing page that makes an actual difference to your business, you’re in the right place. 

With our 11-step guide, you’ll create a landing page that looks good and does good. 

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1. Define your goals

Before you start building your landing page, like with everything else in business, you need to understand what you’re trying to accomplish. 

The perfect landing page should always help you achieve your business goals. 

Most eCommerce businesses focus on creating landing pages that aim to get visitors to buy their products or services. If your goal is to increase profits and drive more sales, your landing page should revolve around a particular product or product category for maximum effectiveness.

If you are, on the other hand, working on the top of your marketing funnel, you might want your landing page to generate more leads. Lead generation landing pages usually try to collect the contact details of users who are interested in your product in general.

To understand what the goal of your landing page is, start by asking yourself the following questions: 

• Are you creating a landing page for advertising a product?  
• Is your goal to generate leads instead of sales? 
• Is the purpose of your landing page to boost brand awareness? 
• Do you want your landing page to be liked by search engines and rank high in the search results?

2. Choose a memorable name for your page 

When it comes to landing pages, a strong page name is essential. 

A good name will help you solidify your branding and makes it crystal clear what the landing page is trying to achieve. 

A vaguely named landing page might confuse or in the worst case misdirect users, reflecting poorly on your business in the long run. 

To avoid this, make sure that your landing page name: 

• Clearly represents your business
• Is short and catchy 
• Is optimized for SEO 

You probably also want to get a unique domain name for your landing page. 

If your landing page will be the only website that you have for your project or business, pay close attention to the kind of custom domain name (that is, your custom URL address) you choose. 

Usually, the rule of thumb is to keep the domain as short as possible, so it’s easy to remember and type. It’s worth doing some keyword research to get a clear idea of the kinds of domains and page names your competitors are using, and what gets searched for in Google and other search engines.

It’s also important to budget for your domain purchase, as domains cost anywhere from a few bucks to $15-$20 per year.

Thankfully, there’s a way to save money with Zyro. All annual website plans come with a free domain name, meaning you won’t have to pay anything extra when setting up your landing page. 

3. Pick a highly converting template 

Next, you need to choose a template for your landing page that not only looks good but also converts visitors. 

Using a landing page template cuts the overall time that it takes to create your website to just a few minutes. 

Ideally, you want to choose a template that supports the latest HTML5 technology and is fully mobile-responsive.  

This way, your landing page will look professional and functional on all mobile devices, no matter the screen size. 

In order to choose the best template for your needs, think about things like: 

• How much landing page copy are you planning to have? 
• How much time do you have to edit your landing page template? 
• How much white space do you want to use? 
• How far down the page do you want your users to scroll? 
• Do you need just a single page, or multiple pages and navigation? 

If you’re stuck for ideas, or unsure about what you want, it’s worthwhile browsing through some of your personal favorite landing pages, or checking out ready-made landing page templates for inspiration.

Take things one step further and use heat mapping tools to analyze your favorite landing page examples understand exactly which elements and sections gather eyeballs. Heat maps also reveal dead spaces on landing pages, helping you position your content in the most effective way. 

4. Craft a compelling message 

Now that you have a goal in mind for your landing page, and you’ve chosen a name and a website template for it, it’s time to start creating content. 

Usually, an effective landing page needs a catchy headline that should highlight your unique selling proposition. 

As the marketing expert David Ogilvy puts it:

In order to get the most out of your money, think outside the box – instead of using tired clichés, try to come up with ways to liven up your core message. 

If you’re stuck for ideas, we recommend trying out Zyro’s AI Writer. All you need to do is feed the AI-powered copy generator some keywords about the topic, and the robot will write up the content for you. 

Since the best and most inspiring brands rely heavily on storytelling in their messaging, think about how you too could tell your key selling points in the form of a story. Better yet, try and mimic this story in your landing page design for maximum impact. 

5. Add a click-worthy CTA

Your call to action (CTA for short) is that section of your landing page that encourages people to do what your landing page intends for them to do. 

If you’re selling shoes on your landing page, your call to action is most likely related to users making a purchase or a pre-order. 

If your landing page is focusing on getting users signed up for an upcoming webinar, then the call to action should focus on encouraging people to sign up for the webinar.

There are a couple of golden rules that you should keep in mind for the best CTAs: 

• Use action verbs. Best CTAs are directly telling the user what they should be doing. Use verbs like ‘buy’, ‘shop’, ‘download’, ‘subscribe’, and ‘order’.
• Use words that evoke enthusiasm (or other relevant emotions). Your CTA can make or break your landing page – so make sure you’re swaying the visitors to do the thing you want them to. There’s a difference between ‘Book your holiday’ and ‘Book your dream holiday’.  
• Give them a reason why. A good CTA reminds the user of your unique selling proposition and the value they will get when they take action (50% off the normal price, for instance). 
• Add urgency. Who doesn’t hate to miss out on a good deal? Add urgency to your CTAs by introducing a time or availability limit to your copy (‘available only this weekend’, or ‘only 50 copies available’).
• Get creative. A strong CTA is creative and relevant to the rest of your landing page. 
• Test different variations. It’s important to keep testing different variations of your CTAs to see which ones work the best.  

6. Establish credibility with social proof

It’s been proven time and time again that nearly all online buyers trust reviews just as much as personal recommendations from friends and family. 

If you want your landing page to look credible and trustworthy, you shouldn’t scrimp and save on showcasing the social proof for your product or service. 

Social proof can be displayed on your landing page in plenty of different ways, like through: 

• Customer reviews
• Testimonials
• Case studies and test results 
• Celebrity and social media influencer endorsements
• Certifications
• Partner and client logos 

Use platforms like TrustPilot to invite existing clients to review their recent purchases and orders. A good strategy to get people to rate your business is by offering them an incentive to do so: you could offer them free shipping for their next order, or 25% off normal priced items. 

While you naturally want to use the most positive and praising reviews on your landing pages, you shouldn’t shy away from negative feedback, either. 

As Bill Gates puts it; 

So take notes any time someone leaves a poor rating, and really dig deep to understand why they did so. Is your customer service slow, or maybe your returns policy needs updating? Whatever it might be, take every unhappy review as a lesson to be learned from. 

7. Enhance with eye-catching visuals and effects 

Want to know the tell-tale sign of a high-converting landing page? 

Stunning images, videos, and other visual effects are having a moment in web design, and for a good reason. Big, image-heavy hero sections, video showreels, and parallax scrolling all make your landing page instantly more engaging and interactive for the visitors. 

While most landing pages have a logo and maybe a picture of the product in question, take yours one step further. 

It’s worth considering how you can make the overall web design of your landing page look visually appealing. 

This means that you should think about the overall color scheme of your website: what are your primary colors, and which colors are reserved for highlighting? 

You shouldn’t neglect the typography or the quality of your product photography, either. 

Especially if your landing page focuses on a product release or increasing sales, your photography should be taking the center of attention on your page. 

Ideally, the overall design of your landing page should reflect your brand and focus on underlining the purpose of your page. 

If you’re trying to generate more email leads or webinar signups, your page design should visually focus on the most important page element – a sign-up form. 

8. Optimize for user experience 

Web design is sadly more than just making your landing page look its best. 

Even if your page looks like a piece of art, if the buttons, forms, and links don’t work, you’re going to end up with frustrated users and a high overall bounce rate.  

Thankfully, focusing on optimizing your landing page for user experience (or UX for short) can help you keep visitors on your website. 

Most often, when you set out to create a landing page, you’re looking at perfecting a single web page. Even a seemingly simple one-pager will benefit from a menu bar that instantly takes users to the right section of the landing page. 

The overall navigation hierarchy should also make sense, no matter how many pages your landing page venture has. This means that the most important and crucial information should be found at the top of the landing page or in the main menu items. 

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel, though – simply scroll through landing pages and websites that you like and get inspired. 

Since web design is a constantly evolving field, trends can change quickly, so you want to aim to go for a simple and clear user experience that stands the test of time. 

Don’t overcomplicate it for yourself: avoid using too many pop-ups, flashing banners, or otherwise overly animating your page. 

Opt for a clean user journey, and ask yourself at every stage: is this necessary for the user to make a buying decision? 

For example, if you’re collecting newsletter signups through social media, evaluate how many clicks it takes for the user to go from having seen your post to having signed up for your emails. 

Spoiler alert: if it takes a user more than 3 or so clicks, the journey is too long (and probably boring or confusing, too). 

9. Double-check and publish 

You’ve finished designing your great landing page, but it’s not time to pop the champagne just yet. 

Before you click on publish, tab out of the builder and get on with your life, you need to go through the whole page with fresh eyes. 

This way, you avoid any unintentional typos in your copy or a glitch in your navigation menu. Your landing page (and your brand by extension) will look professional and you’ll be able to make those first impressions count – both figuratively and literally. 

If you’re getting blind to your own work, ask a friend to go over each section of your landing page – or better yet, hire an external editor or proofreader to go through your landing page before click ‘save and publish’. 

Sites like Fiverr and Upwork have big pools of freelancers to choose from. 

10. Promote and drive traffic 

Now that you have a live landing page, it’s time to start driving traffic to it. 

The most popular ways to generate web traffic are through search engines, paid advertising, or social media. 

Search engine optimization or SEO for short relies on different on- and off-page strategies for maximum visibility in Google. Some of the most effective SEO tactics include: 

• Targeting the right keywords in strategic places on your landing page 
• Having meta tags for your page 
• Using proper page formatting for headings and copy 
• Having alt texts for all images 
• Compressing big files for better page speed 
• Having reliable web hosting and an SSL certificate
• Having enough internal and external links to your own content and other relevant websites 

Paid advertising similarly relies on keywords, but requires you to pay for the clicks or views your ad gets. You’re also usually betting against other brands and businesses for the top keywords, meaning that the better your niche is (and the longer and more specific your keyword is), the easier it will be to keep your ad costs at bay. 

When it comes to promoting your landing page on social media, you have generally a couple of options. 

You could create profiles for your project or business, start sharing your landing page link as part of your social media marketing strategy and organically grow your presence. This strategy is great if you have time to spare and a small budget.  

You could run paid advertising campaigns on social media platforms and target the ideal users who you think are interested in your brand and landing page. This usually requires some budget for being effective.

Or, you could partner up with social media influencers and get them to promote your landing page and project for you. Depending on the niche of the influencer and the size of their following, you could end up paying quite a lot of money, but end up with very warm leads (people who are keen on purchasing your product or service). 

11. Track your performance 

Lastly, it’s important to remember to track how well your landing page is performing. 

Without analytics data, you won’t have an idea of how many people visited your landing page, where they came from, and how long they stayed on your page. 

Worse still, you won’t know the conversion rates for different types of marketing campaigns, making it difficult to judge which channels worked the best for your audience. 

It might sound intimidating to start messing around with analytics software, but most modern data apps don’t require a degree in data or rocket science. 

If you’re using a landing page creator, you should have access to plenty of built-in marketing tools and integration options to streamline your data.  

Most marketing campaigns rely heavily on Google Analytics, thanks to its easy-to-use interface and rich filtering options.  

Ideally, you should have a couple of different versions available of your landing page for A/B-testing. Most often, running A/B-tests means petting two variations of a landing page (or any other campaign) and splitting the overall web traffic evenly for both. 

After the test has been running for a week or two, it’s time to analyze and compare the results. A/B-testing helps you finetune your landing page and understand just what page elements, sections, or design choices make users convert and make a purchase. 

Why do I need a landing page? 

Sometimes, it’s easy to think you don’t need a separate landing page – after all, you have a great home page that already attracts the most visitors to your site. 

Unlike your home page, which acts as the main touchpoint for your business and brand, a landing page is clutter-free and more focused on a single action. 

Most people use the home page of their website to introduce themselves to a potential customer, giving them an idea of what your business is all about. This means that the overall scroll depth of your home page is longer – after all, you need to fit the section about your mission, values, and brand history somewhere, right? 

A purpose-built landing page, on the other hand, is purpose-built to increase conversions and capture leads. This means that the single page is usually shorter than your home page, and focuses completely on your marketing efforts instead. 

Landing pages help to create a smooth customer journey, without any distracting links to other pages.  

Most common ways to use your own landing page 

A powerful landing page grabs the visitor’s attention and guides them to perform the desired action. You might want to create a simple landing page to collect email addresses for your newsletter or use a high-converting landing page to sell your product. 

There are more uses for landing pages than you might realize, so to make sure you’re building the right landing page for your needs, here are some of the most popular ways to use a landing page. 

Product launch 

Do you run a business that’s about to launch a new product or service? 

You should create a landing page for it. 

Ideally, you want to have your landing page design ready before you’ve launched your product, so you can build hype and take pre-orders for your product.

This way, you can get a good idea of how your new product will be received by your target audience. 

A great landing page for a product launch isn’t overly complicated: you should include some basic information about your new product and have a contact form readily available for website visitors to register their interest. 

Since you’re only collecting basic contact information from your customers, you won’t have to worry about including payment gateways on your landing page. Make it clear in your copy that you’re collecting reservations only for your new product and will contact the customers with more details later. 

Link to your product launch landing page from blog posts, social media and PPC ads, newsletters, and your website’s product pages to make sure your visitors land on your new landing page with ease. 

Email sign-ups 

Believe it or not, email marketing is still going strong, with the global email market being worth nearly $8 billion US dollars in 2020.

That’s why you too shouldn’t be neglecting your email marketing. The easiest way to get started is by using a landing page builder to create a landing page solely for email sign-ups. 

This type of landing page is easy and fast to create: you need a compelling reason for users to sign up for your newsletter and a contact form, and you’re done. 

Remember to be transparent and clear about the types of emails you are planning to send your sign-ups: nobody wants to receive unsolicited emails from third-party businesses that have nothing to do with the original brand they wanted to hear news from. 

You only use your landing page to collect the email addresses, so it’s important to set up newsletter templates and email flows in an email marketing tool. There are plenty of free services to try out, so you won’t have to worry about making huge investments while you’re finding your feet.

Event or course registration 

Landing pages are a useful tool for collecting RSVP’s for event or course registrations, too. 

Rather than accidentally scattering important attendee information all over the place, a landing page help you create a single source of truth for your event. 

Being able to display all the relevant information to an event or a course in one place makes it easier and faster for potential attendees to decide whether they want to attend or not, too. 

The page design for these types of landing pages is heavily influenced by the type of event in question. For a family reunion or a wedding registration page you usually just need to include a simple contact form and information about the time and place of the event. 

If you’re building a landing page for a corporate function or a sporting event, for example, you might want to include a section at the top of the landing page with some information about the event in general, and why it’s worth attending.

Advertisement 

Having your own landing page for an advertising campaign is one of the worst-kept secrets of the marketing world. 

Using purpose-built landing pages for a particular marketing campaign helps to simplify the user journey, and track user behavior along the way. 

Let’s say you’re launching a marketing campaign for Black Friday. You’ve planned paid adverts for both search engines and social media, have your blog posts and newsletter campaign ready. 

Will you simply link all these different campaigns to your home page? By doing so you risk losing the users, as it’s not crystal clear for them what you expect them to do: should they make a purchase, or visit your About Us page?

Having a seasonal landing page for your ad campaign is a more effective way for creating conversions and seeing a real impact on your overall sales figures. 

Coming soon page 

These kinds of landing pages are similar to those used for product launches.

The main difference with ‘coming soon’ landing pages is that they can be used for just about any venture that’s about to be unveiled. 

You could build a ‘coming soon’ landing page for a new business that’s about to be launched, or for an event that you’re still finalizing. 

These kinds of landing pages help you market your upcoming venture in style – plus, you’ll be able to get your hands on the domains that you need on time. 

If you’re relying on a strong SEO strategy, creating a ‘coming soon’ landing page can also help you rank better since you can start collecting strong external links even before your product or service has been launched.

And the more helpful links you have to your landing page, the higher your page will be shown in the search results of Google. 

What to look for in the best landing page builder 

Creating a landing page starts with choosing a great landing page builder. 

But what are the things that you should be paying attention to when shopping for the builder? 

1. Plenty of landing page templates 

Regardless of whether you’re setting out to build one landing page or multiple, you want to save time and use website templates. 

The best builders offer plenty of different ready-made templates to choose from, making it easy to start editing off the bat. 

Ideally, you should only need to change the background image, the copy on the web pages, and your meta description and page title before you click save and publish your creation.  

2. Drag-and-drop builder 

Preferably, you want to start editing with a visual editor that lets you see the changes you’re making to your page straight away. 

A drag-and-drop page builder works best for first-timers who don’t know how to code.

Since you quite literally drag and drop various page elements around, these tools are intuitive and fast to work with, even if you’ve never designed a website in your life. 

3. Availability of other tools 

Sure, you might not need a fully-fledged email service provider for your new landing page, but the top website builders come with useful tools that help you manage and grow your online presence. 

For example, you might want to integrate different social media and analytics tools into your landing page. 

Zyro offers various AI-powered technologies to get you online fast: the AI Writer does the heavy lifting for those in a rush to get the content out there, while the different image tools make sure you get the most out of your visuals. 

4. Price

Who doesn’t love a good deal? 

While you might not be able to score a completely free landing page builder that offers you unlimited landing pages, ideally your platform should come with all the icing and cherry on top while still being affordable. 

Keep an eye out for any additional fees or commissions that your shortlisted platforms might charge. Thankfully, with Zyro you won’t have to worry about any hidden costs, since the all-inclusive website plans start from a couple of dollars a month.

Land more customers with effective landing pages  

By now, you should know the answers to questions about how to create a landing page and why you should use landing pages in the first place. 

Well-optimized landing pages make it easy to track and convert visitors to paying customers. At their best, they help you build a proper sales funnel and simplify the user journey. 

We might be biased, but if you’re looking for the best landing page builder, you should give Zyro a go. With the best drag-and-drop website builder, you can build landing pages in moments and get on with your day, without sacrificing style or functionality.

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