Your ad campaign has done its job and a lead has clicked on your attention-grabdomain call to action. Your future client is whisked over to your website – and they find themselves on a landing page.
Landing pages – your bottom of the funnel entry point – are also known as “lead capture” pages because they’re crucial conversion points. You can think of them like the moment you’re at the check out, and deciding if you really want to buy the items in your basket.
Creating a high-converting landing page is easier than you think. With the right tools, design principles, and best practices, you can boost ROI, data collection, and user engagement. Here’s your landing page step-by-step guide.
1. Define your Landing Page Strategy
First, consider the purpose and goal of your landing page:
- Are you trying to get people to buy a product?
- To sign up to a service?
- To collect feedback?
The clearer your objective is, the more focused your landing page will be. This purpose will define your call-to-action (CTA) and (hopefully) lead to more conversions. For example, if you want to encourage users to download an ebook, your CTA could be ‘Download now’.
You also need to pinpoint your target audience:
- Who do you want to arrive at your landing page?
- What motivates them?
By building your page with your audience in mind, you’ll include information and a structure that really resonates with them. Perhaps you’re addressing busy professionals who prefer concise copy and mobile-friendly design.
Then, zoom out to your broader marketing funnel. Will your landing page be part of an email campaign, social ad or organic search traffic?
Walk through the user journey to double check that the landing page makes sense and that you can make the copy and design consistent with the preceding steps. This awareness will mean that users can navigate your landing page easily and will be more likely to trust your brand and convert.
This first step lays the foundation for your landing page. The stronger your base, the more easily you can grow results on it.
2. Craft Copy and Design Content
The copy and design of your landing page play a big role in guiding users to your desired action (the CTA). The two elements should complement each other and align with your branding.
To begin, write copy (the text that appears on the page) using clear, simple language. Avoid long sentences and more than three lines of text per paragraph.
Use headers, subheaders, and body text to structure the copy, and highlight text that emphasizes your value proposition. For example, “Save 50% on your first order” or “Ends Soon: 3 months of Premium for $0” could be a header with a clear promise.
Speak to users directly in your copy, using "you" to address audience problems and stress how your product/service is a solution. Bullet points, lists, and quotes are also good to space out copy and ensure a logical reading order.
Pay close attention to your CTA. It should be specific and use active verbs like ‘buy’, ‘book’, ‘download’. Make sure it stands out from the rest of your copy – as a button or in a different color/format – and repeat it where appropriate across the page.
Once you have your copy ready, select what photos, videos or infographics you want on the page. All visual components should be high quality and explain or elaborate on your copy.
The hero image is particularly important. This is the image above the page fold (where you have to start scrolling down to view more) and should be carefully selected to represent your brand and grab people’s attention quickly.
Social proof like testimonials and trust badges can help build credibility for your landing page too.
Be conscious not to overload your landing page with copy and design content. The idea is to have an aesthetically-pleasing and easy-to-use page, and often less is more.
3. Choose Your Landing Page Platform
Now it’s time to think about the tool you use to publish your landing page. Different landing page builders can support different goals.
For example, Landing Page Builder from Semrush is a comprehensive platform to create and launch your landing pages.
You don’t need to code to use the tool, which has pre-made templates, complete with landing page design tips, for every kind of business and website.
Within these templates, you can quickly and easily drag and drop features for your landing page, enabling you to make more value-driven landing pages at scale, and more efficiently.
You may have to adjust your copy and images to fit a template you’re working with, so be sure to look for something with flexibility to fit your strategy.
Landing Page Builder also includes:
- Mobile view to see you landing page layout on small devices
- ‘Thank You’ page builder
- Free assets including icons, images, and predefined elements
- Funnel and form creator to improve lead generation
- Changelog (to restore previous work when needed)
- “Smart Sections” to help you update hundreds of pages in one click
- Ability to add domains and publish pages with enforced SSL, and use WordPress plugin or download a PHP file to keep the page on your servers
Other platforms like Unbounce and Instapage are great for marketing-focused pages, while WordPress and Squarespace work well for broader website integration.
You’ll also need to factor in your tech capabilities: do you know how to code and want to showcase your tech expertise? Or do you need an easy-to-use tool that saves time and prioritizes scale?
Either way, your platform should have customization features where you can tailor the page to your brand standards, and create a truly unique landing page.
4. Review Clarity and Responsiveness
Everyone in your audience (and people outside of it) need to be able to use your landing page with ease. Before hitting ‘publish’, double check the following:
- The message is concise and oriented around one goal. The chronology of the text makes sense, and there are distinct CTAs throughout the page.
- The landing page adapts to different screen sizes and resolutions. Buttons, images, and forms all resize dynamically when your page is viewed on desktop or mobile (Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test can help with this).
- There are no broken links or multimedia on your landing page. Data capture and payment form entry fields all work and successfully process data.
It’s essential that you check accessibility here too. Your landing page should have high color contrasts combinations for the text and background to ensure everyone can read it.
You need descriptive alt text for your images and interactive elements, and keyboard navigation should be active.
Refer to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines for other ways to make your landing page inclusive, and run your page through an accessibility checker to accommodate your users’ diverse needs.
5. Integrate Tools and Analytics
There are so many tools to create a landing page, but your landing page has to be plugged into the ones that track and offer insights around your goal.
This network ensures that you have total oversight over your landing page’s performance, and that important data is correctly stored and you can make informed decisions based on it.
You should consider connecting your landing page to:
- CRM systems
- Analytics tools like Google Analytics and Hotjar
- Facebook Pixel
- Marketing tools like Mailchimp and HubSpot
- Sales tools like Salesforce
- Data capture tools like Typeform
- Ecommerce tools like Shopify
- Ads tools like Google Ads
- SEO tools like Semrush
With these connected tools, you can monitor metrics like bounce rates, time spent on page, conversion rates, lead capture rate, sign-ups, social shares, and more. This information tells you if your landing page is achieving its objective.
Using a wide net of tools also enables you to carry out A/B testing better. You can create multiple variants of your landing page to show to different segments of your audience, or simply to test if certain copy/design/UX converts more.
With Landing Page Builder, you can personalize A/B landing page variants, and then test these to choose the best communication strategy for your campaign.
After you’ve built and published a landing page with the app, use the ‘Optimization’ tool to duplicate the page as a new variant, and specify what percentage of traffic you want to see this variant.
After, you can edit the new variant page and set it live, then view analytics for both pages in the dashboard.
6. Launch, Observe, and Optimize
At this point, you’ve got everything in place. After a test run of the page, set your landing page live.
From day one, you need to keep atop of metrics. If you’re using a number of tools to collect different data, try to have a place where all the information is collectively stored – this way, you can spot trends more easily and take action.
You’ll also need to watch your A/B testing and let the data tell you what components resonate best with your audiences. Equally, keep up to date on any qualitative data like form feedback or user ratings.
This is a crucial initial phase that informs your landing page optimization. Focus on listening to (or rather, reading) how people interact and convert with your page.
Give yourself set time periods (e.g. two-week sprints) to review data and make changes according to it. For example, if data shows that users spend a long time on your landing page but don’t convert, you could experiment with changing the CTA design and copy.
Or, if data reveals that version B of your A/B testing is more successful, you could decide to launch that as the permanent landing page.
Springboards to Success
Despite being key gateways to improve your ROI and audience engagement, landing pages are surprisingly straightforward to make. And like all elements of your website and marketing strategy, they need to be maintained and consistently tested to ensure that they are relevant and drive real value for your users.
Dedicate time and tools to your landing pages and you’ll have a series of springboards to higher conversions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do landing pages connect to the rest of my website?
Yes, landing pages connect to the rest of your website, but they are designed to keep users focused on a specific desired action (making a purchase, signing up, downloading). This approach maximizes conversions.
What types of CTAs are on landing pages?
Common CTAs on landing pages include ‘Sign up’, ‘Download now’, ‘Start free trial’, or ‘Buy now’. Alternatively, the CTA could be a form to collect users’ information, such as email addresses or feedback.
Why is my landing page not converting?
Unclear messaging, a weak or hidden CTA, cluttered design, slow page load time, and friction in the user journey (an unexpected landing page) can all contribute to poor landing page performance.