Five top tips for writing landing pages

The landing page. It’s one of the most important pages that you will work on for any website. It can determine how long a customer will stay on the site and even how popular it will be. For the visitor, landing pages are a gateway to the information, product or service that they are looking for. For you it’s a way of getting the visitor to stay on your site. By providing highly relevant content you can get better attention from the main search engines which could even improve your page rank.

So here we go with our five top tips for writing landing pages.

1. Plan your landing page

Good planning is paramount. To get it right you need to start with a blank canvas. Take a piece of paper and sketch what you would like the page to look like – where you want buttons, heading, hyperlinks and even paragraphs to go. This can help you optimize your page. Make a clean uncluttered design which is easier on the eye. Better still, get a designer to help you out on this.

2. Present a clear and concise message

They say you only have one chance to make a first impression. This is the first page that people are going to see so this could be your only chance to present and sell your business. Make sure you are selling it in the best possible way by presenting a clear concise and persuasive message. Talk about how and why it’s unique. What’s in it for the customer?

3. Use bullet points

By highlighting main points in bullet point form you are highlighting important information for the visitor. This is also an ideal opportunity to add strong SEO keywords. This will not only keep visitors on your website for longer but help you get the attention of the main search engines.

4. Keep the first paragraph short

Let’s look back at the first tip: particularly making the page easy on the eye. You’ll need to make sure that it’s easy to read. This means making the text flow properly. Starting the copy on your landing page with a short paragraph is certainly one way to achieve this. It should introduce your business but without getting into details. You want the visitor to either decide then and there to buy or at least to continue reading further.

5. Finally…. test everything!

This could be the most important page of the website so test everything thoroughly. Make sure everything fits the way you want and also ensure that every link, button and detail is correct and works. If you’re using SEO keywords make sure they are correct too especially if you are using long tail keywords. The last thing you want is to go live and find that a button or link within your page doesn’t work. That doesn’t create a good impression at all.

It is a good idea to have a look at a few websites in similar markets to yours for some ideas and inspiration. Many modern website designs have a clean appearance which also makes a site more navigable. Above all remember that content is king where search engines are concerned so some good photos or illustrations will help too (especially if they’ve got captions). And if you have a video even better.

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