10 Reasons Why Your Landing Page Is Useless

Your landing page can make or break an inbound marketing campaign.

But there’s more to a good landing page than just looking good—if it doesn’t get results, it doesn’t matter how pretty it is!

Only about 22% of brands are happy with the conversion rates on their landing pages, but most don’t go through the trouble to optimize them.

Don’t let yourself be among the complainers who never take action—read on to learn 10 of the most common pitfalls, and how you can fix them.

1. Your Call-to-Action is Weak

If people arriving on your landing page can’t tell what to do right away, they’re likely to hit the back button and forget about you—so your call-to-action is probably the most important part of your landing page.

Even though almost everyone knows the CTA is critical, 53% of websites don’t have a call-to-action that visitors notice within three seconds. Some reasons your call-to-action might be failing:

Your landing page doesn’t even have one.
The CTA is below the fold (unless your above-the-fold copy is amazing at grabbing attention), or otherwise not as apparent to visitors as it should be.
The colors used in your CTA don’t stand out from the other elements on the page.
Your CTA is too boring and generic to get people to act (like “Buy Now,” “Click Here,” or “Submit”).

To get your visitors’ attention, your call-to-action has to stand out. Make it as clear and distinctive as possible to help your landing page convert, and split test alternatives to figure out what performs best.

2. You Use Images Poorly

While awesome images can boost your site’s aesthetic appeal and strengthen your user experience, some images are more likely to distract visitors—or even damage your brand.

Watch out for these mistakes when choosing images to use on a landing page:

Using images that aren’t relevant to the page
Using stock photos and other generic, boring images
Drawing attention away from the call-to-action with large photos

Be careful to select images that support your landing page’s goals. Original images of people using your product convert better than stock photos.

3. Your Landing Page is the Wrong Length

In general, landing pages should be as short as possible to avoid diluting the message or distracting from the call to action. But like any generalization, that’s not always the case.

Though shorter landing pages usually get more conversions, some products need more copy to convert leads—particularly for bigger ticket items.

The best length for your landing page tends to correlate with your sales price because people generally want more information before deciding to make a major purchase.

Again, it’s worthwhile to spend plenty of time A/B testing to figure out the best word count for your landing page.

4. Your Landing Page Isn’t Relevant to Your Ads

People get frustrated when they click on an ad expecting one thing and then end up on a page with completely different information.

You must keep promises you make to visitors with PPC or media buys to drive traffic. You do that by ensuring the message stays consistent between your ads and your landing page.

Use the same keywords. MecLabs did a study that found one brand increased lead generation by 144% just by keeping the keywords the same across its ads and landing pages.
Tell people what they’ll find. Your ads need to communicate clearly what to expect from your landing page. If the point of your landing page is to get visitors to make free accounts on your site, your ads need to convey that goal.
Keep your message uniform. Keep the point your ads and landing pages convey as consistent as you can. Don’t confuse people by changing the message from one place to another.

5. Your Page Takes Too Long to Load

The typical Internet user is impatient—deliver content quickly, or they won’t convert.

A Moz study found that landing page conversions can go up by 14% when landing page load time is reduced from 5 seconds down to 2 seconds.

If your landing page takes too long to load, it can hurt conversions. The best way to cut your load time is to reduce HTTP requests.

Yahoo says around 80% of web page load time comes from downloading scripts, images, and other page elements. Instead of embedding images, use CSS as much as possible and minimize the elements and images on the page.

6. Your Content is Poorly Written

Even if the technical aspects of your landing page are properly set up, if your content is confusing or unreadable it will turn people off and hurt your brand.

Though the writing on your landing page doesn’t have to be written with perfect academic quality, it does need to effectively communicate your message without distracting errors.

If the writing on your landing page isn’t up to snuff, there are lots of services online that can do detailed reviews of your site and even rewrite the copy for you.

7. Your Formatting is Bad

One of the easiest ways to improve user experience and conversion rate is by fixing problems with formatting. The following can help make your landing page better:

The fonts you use are important. Beyond ensuring you don’t use comic sans, you should make your text consistent, readable, and crisp. Keep spacing uniform and use the same font throughout the page.
Use headers, sub-headers, bullets, numbered bullets, and other formatting to organize your text and make it easy for readers to follow.
For clarity, stick with black text on a white background unless you have an extremely good reason not to.

8. You’re Sending Traffic Elsewhere

The point of a landing page is to convince visitors to convert, and they’re not going to do so if they click a link from your landing page to some other page or site.

Don’t include any unnecessary links on your landing page—that means no ads for other sites, and maybe even leaving your site’s navigation menu off of landing pages!

9. You’re Not Mobile-Optimized

More than 90% of small business websites aren’t optimized for mobile traffic, even though mobile traffic has been greater than desktop since 2014.

Everything from design best practices to search algorithms reflect the trend, so responsive design is critical.

Test landing pages on various device emulators to ensure everything’s organized correctly, but also check whether your pages are user-friendly. Bad user experience will kill your conversions.

Make sure any interactive elements or third-party apps on your site work seamlessly on mobile—nothing pushes mobile visitors away faster than a pop-up cutting off access to your site’s content!

10. You’re Targeting the Wrong Audience

Getting as many leads as possible is good, right? Not necessarily:

Targeting too broad of an audience means you won’t connect deeply with anyone. Clearly define your pitch to resonate with the people who are actually most likely to need and buy what you’re selling.
Buying untargeted or badly targeted leads wastes money you should be spending elsewhere
Targeting everyone attracts people to claim your opt-in incentives and bloat your mailing list without ever making a purchase. Design your landing pages to filter them out, and you’ll avoid the stress of dealing with such low-quality leads.

This is a pitfall of offering a teaser product at no charge. If it appeals to more than your ideal customers, you can collect junk leads that waste everyone’s time.

One solution is to require a small purchase at the beginning of the conversion process.

That forces prospects to invest in the solution, even if only a little bit—which can strengthen their relationship with the seller. Overall conversion might drop, but long-term sales might actually increase.

No Better Time than Now

Don’t let a broken landing page keep draining your conversions.

Take action to ensure your landing pages provide a great user experience, communicate your message clearly, and provide a strong call-to-action.

If you’re not sure how to make the changes yourself, programs like Lander can help you.

You'll be able to build and test landing pages quickly. This tool provide industry-proven templates and intuitive user interfaces that require no knowledge of HTML.