Are You Making These Mistakes on Your Landing Pages?

 Some kinds of website mistakes simply result in poor aesthetics. At other times, you can make mistakes on the most important pages on your site - your landing pages - in ways that actually cost you sales. Here are a few examples of what can go wrong.

Using a headline on the landing page that has nothing to do with the link leading in

Whether it is a PPC ad that people click on to come to your landing page or a link on some other website, no good can come of disappointing their natural expectation that the page they arrive on should be exactly what the link suggested.

For instance, if you have an ad selling CLEAR Internet in Apex on a search engine but the landing page has the title Competitively priced ISP, your visitors are not going to be pleased. It doesn't even matter if they both refer to the same thing as far as you're concerned. The one second that your visitors wonder if they have been baited and switched is all you need to lose a customer.

You are too narrowly focused on one type of visitor

Different visitors to a webpage can care about different things. To some, familiarity is everything. To others, the kind of website that they come from can mean a lot. Yet others only care about what their friends say or what Internet sellers have the most Likes on Facebook. You can't simply focus on one kind of customer. You need to have something for everyone. To help convert every visitor, you could list all the possible benefits that there are to your product as soon as they land on your landing page.

Once you have a visitor hooked, you can show him what other people have to say about your products. When they are truly interested, you can offer a friendly representative for the visitor to chat with.

Some webpages simply offer every visitor a representative to chat to without giving the visitor a true argument for why he should bother.

Not understanding that the first-time visitor needs an extra push

Many online retailers are set up to reward every new sign-up with a discount. These retailers realize that customers can have a hard time making a move the first time.

There's another reason why offering incentives to the first-time visitor makes sense. The analytics at many retailers usually show that most visitors are usually first-time ones. Since these are the majority of your visitors, it makes sense to have something special lined up for them - on the landing page.

Not constantly testing your landing page to see what works best

None of these rules works in every scenario. A lot depends on the kind of product you sell and the kind of expectations your customers have. It's always important to constantly experiment and to test for the most effective landing formula that works for you.

Ben Easton is a content marketer. He loves to share his best tips on small business blogs.