By Adam Blackford-Mills, Digital Sales And Marketing Director at MRS Digital, a leading SEO agency in Hampshire.
The most successful PPC landing pages all share five important features. Each of these are used to encourage the audience to a call to action that leads to conversions again and again. Landing pages need to be well thought out so that they don’t simply grab attention. They need to offer the audience value. They should be reassuring, clear, and easy to navigate.
To achieve this, landing pages should be perfectly refined after multiple tests and format experimentation. In order to create a successful PPC landing page that delivers conversions, be sure to consider these five features:
- Make sure it’s attention-grabbing
- Illustrate the value of your offering
- Encourage viewers to trust you
- Keep your landing page simple
- Ensure the path to conversion is clear
1. Make sure it’s attention-grabbing
There are a range of ways to make your PPC landing page attention-grabbing. Whether you simply present an offer that the audience can’t refuse, you use flashing bright signage, or you incorporate stunning imagery and assets, you need to make the page memorable. It should capture and hold on to a viewer’s engagement straight away.
After all, a PPC landing page is an advert, not a text-led webpage. Despite what your company is about, it’s important to leave technical information behind at this stage, and instead present the nuts and bolts of your product on your landing page. The advert should be clean and simple, with bold headings that display information clearly. If your campaign is discount-centred, make sure this is visible immediately. If you have a truly unique offering, make sure this is 100% obvious.
2. Illustrate the value of your offering
The only way to gain conversions is to convince your audience of the value of your product and service. Your leading benefits, whether this is a discount, a free trial, or unbeatable service, should be clearly presented.
You need to make sure the audience is well aware of the value of what you have to offer. Use clear and positive language, and present the information in an easy-to-absorb way such as with bullet points and tick lists. A key part of building a quality landing page is presenting your message quickly and clearly to hook interest.
If you have a lot of competition for your product or service, this is your opportunity to present the reasons why a customer should choose you. While you should not directly compare your company with another, if possible, find a way to put together a pros and cons comparison, that illustrates the benefits of opting for your service.
3. Encourage viewers to trust you
There’s a good chance that a significant proportion of those who land on your PPC page are unfamiliar with your company. When this happens, it’s vital that you encourage those viewers to trust your brand. However, simply saying ‘you should trust us’ won’t work. You need to give the audience real evidence explaining why they should.
The best way to do this is to include testimonials and mention any awards and other accreditations you’ve earned. People want to know that you are trusted by others, especially if you can demonstrate working with respected, well-established brands. If you’ve worked with well-known companies, include their recognisable logos in your landing page. Don’t be afraid to name-drop and use quotes that praise your service wherever possible.
You could also consider using colour psychology to help invoke trust in your brand. Blue is known to be associated with loyalty and trust, which is why it’s used in the logos of banks such as Halifax, Nationwide, and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Test landing pages using blue text, backgrounds and imagery to see if this makes a difference.
4. Keep your landing page simple
The most effective landing pages are those that have one clear and simple message and one call to action. This keeps the audience focussed on your offering, and makes it all the more easy for them to make the decision to take the next step. Instead of muddying your landing page with a range of products, services, and choices, good practice is to keep things simple.
It’s known that giving people too many options when they are close to making a final decision causes confusion and doubt. As soon as this occurs and a landing page viewer hesitates, they are as good as lost. A doubtful viewer is likely to leave your page and start looking elsewhere.
Another consideration to make regarding simplicity is doing what you can to meet the intent of the searcher. For example, if you’re targeting someone searching for black trainers, make sure you show them black trainers – not a wide selection of all the shoes you have to offer.
5. Ensure the path to conversion is clear
While we’re talking about keeping things simple, it’s also important to keep the landing page design clear so that access to your call to action is obvious. To this end, make sure you don’t include a navigation in the header or footer, or links in the body of the text. This ensures there is only one link to click on, which improves the overall chances of a conversion.
Make sure your viewer doesn’t have the opportunity to be distracted on your page. A successful landing page should be minimalistic, with just one clear button that leads to the next step. Remember, less is more.
After putting these five tips into practice to create your landing page, the next thing to do is play around with its format, design and language during hours of testing. There are a range of analytics tools to use to track your campaigns, which will reveal what is and isn’t successful. Make sure you check the data on a regular basis and make changes accordingly. Only with data-driven information can you create a landing page that you know will work.
