How Visitors Experience Landing Page Website Design
By Gregory Smyth
Millions of dollars is spent on market research annually, and countless hours in brainstorming and analyzing, trying to get inside the minds of customers. What is immediately apparent when you are on the buying side of a website page is not so easy to see when your perceptions are clouded by what you are trying to achieve with it. Here, we look at what top internet consulting firms have learnt about how visitors experience your landing pages. We also look at how to build on your search engine optimization efforts and turn prospects into actual buyers, simply with the power of a good landing page.
Your web page is not going to be useful to every person that clicks on it. This simple fact of life cannot be changed by the best search engine optimization, the most thorough market research or the best web analytics on the globe. As many as 50% of visitors will leave a landing page within the first 8 seconds of viewing it. Your website design, and all of the non-verbal cues that a good online marketing agency knows how to weave in seamlessly, will be the factor that helps your prospects make a decision about whether this page is for you. Your ultimate aim is to ensure that for people whose needs really do match your offer, the dropout rate is as low as possible.
While there are plenty more in-depth guidelines for each of these elements of landing page design, here are the main website design offenders when it comes to driving away qualified visitors from your landing pages.
- Type that is difficult to read, either because it is the wrong color, size, alignment, or typeface
- Perceived professionalism of the design - does the site look amateurish, and therefore untrustworthy?
- Is the website design of the entire page easy to understand, or will the reader have to scan around to find the action they are supposed to take?
- Relevance of headline wording to the visitor's source - does the message of the landing page headlines match that of the banner ad, PPC ad or other source that guests clicked on?
- The design of your form can negate all of your viral marketing and search engine optimization efforts. Keep your forms simple to stop people bailing just to avoid the work of filling them out
- Ensure your graphics are related to the benefits of your offer, not to items that visitors do not recognize. Clipart is one of the main culprits in early dropouts, as are obscure logos.
Copywriting is one of the elements that can make or break the conversion for visitors that decide to stick around. Hire a professional, or do extensive research into copywriting for the web to ensure that what you say doesn't send your visitors packing. Credentials are also useful at this stage, and security logos and other guarantees can help convince your visitors that conversion is safe and worthwhile.
Form design is also a specialized field of website design. For best ROI from your search engine marketing efforts, ensure your forms are error-free, and make them as short as possible. Don't include 'Clear Form' buttons, as if these are mistakenly clicked instead of the Submit button, your prospect simply may not bother filling in all of the information again. Ensure you have an email privacy statement, and give alternative forms of contact with your business for best results.