Five Reasons Why Your Landing Pages May Not Be Converting

Your landing pages are essentially the first look potential customers will get at your business. In a way they are your business card to the virtual world. But more than that they need to be a call to action for your visitors to go ahead and purchase or seek more information. Poor link building and badly designed landing pages are often the main cause of traffic not converting.

It can be easy to assume that because your website is not generating any money that all your hard work has been for nothing, but in fact this is not necessarily the case. If you think that the problem lies with your landing pages, you will need to identify the reasons why your landing pages may not be converting. Once you have identified the issues surrounding your lack of conversions you can then try to improve your landing pages and other calls to action, to encourage more of that traffic to actually take that call to action.

1. Your Links: Do your links actually target relevant pages? It is a common mistake to aim every link to the homepage, but does this actually relate to the link visitors click on in the first place? For instance, if you are trying to sell lawnmowers then it makes sense to point your lawnmower ads and links to your lawnmower product pages. Do not think that by merely directing traffic to any page in your website, visitors will go to the trouble of searching further for the information they want.
2. Your Content: How much information have you provided on your pages? How have you titled your pages and more importantly named products? Always optimize your pages, particularly product pages with the names or titles most commonly searched for. These you should have identified as you’re highly targeted keywords as part of your SEO strategy. For instance, a page titled Flymo Lawnmower will probably convert better than simply using just Lawnmower or even a model number.
   Also try to include as much useful information as you can, including prices or fees. It is worth noting that internet shoppers can be quite lazy and around 80% will not bother to look beyond what is initially presented on their screens. Although this does not necessarily mean they will not scroll down, it does mean you cannot take it for granted, which leads me onto my next point:
3. Your Calls to Action: If you assume that visitors will not scroll down the page then you need to ensure you include the attention grabbing content at the top (what we call above the fold), along with links or buttons to either purchase your products or request further information about your services. Make these nice and shiny and use bright colors. Pale colors may coordinate nicely with your website theme, but they are not exactly attention grabbing. Remember that landing pages need to call for one specific action and not clearly asking visitors to take that action could be the biggest cause of your lack of conversions.
4. Your Page Aesthetics: Imagine stepping into a store filled with poorly organized, untidy looking shelves and unreadable signage. Chances are you will simply turn around and walk back out the door. The same could apply to your website and the overall look and feel of your landing pages. Whilst adding a little color and interesting graphics is a good idea do not go overboard by adding absurdly bright colors, bad fonts and cheap looking clipart. Just like a bricks and mortar store you want to enhance your visitors experience and instantly make them feel that they have come to website that is both credible and trustworthy.
5. Your Overall Site Design: Try to avoid cramming every available space on your website with ads, flash graphics and other irrelevant information. It is both confusing and a distraction and a big cause of loss of conversions. Try to keep your site design and landing pages clean and uncluttered, especially when you want a particular call to action.

It goes without saying that by improving your landing pages should help your SEO campaign and improve your site rankings. Google loves websites which are clean and tidy, full of useful content and of course are relevant to the links pointing at them. Get all of these thing right and you should see results very quickly indeed.