People say ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’. But when you’re online, what else do you have to go on? Bottom line, if you don’t give a strong first impression in the first few seconds, prospective customers will not hesitate to hit the back button and go straight to your competition. That’s of course not what we want as it means lost opportunity, and also that your investment in Google ads advertising isn’t efficiently converting into enquiries and sales, which is our number one objective.

A landing page, is simply the page on your website that we ‘land’ traffic on. This can be be a standalone ‘lead capture page’, or just a ‘service page’ on your website designed to introduce and explain to prospective customers what makes you a great choice, and help convert them into enquiries and sales.

Why should you listen to us?

With a $112M managed Google Ads spend, we’ve seen it all, and know a thing or two about what works, and what doesn’t. From a conversion rate optimisation perspective, we see websites making the same mistakes over, and over, and over again. Sometimes it even drives us a little mental. So help us help you avoid these common mistakes, and instead, let’s put you in a strong position to kick some serious goals!

A quick note about RELEVANCE

OK, let’s get this out of the way. If someone is searching specifically for Red Shiny Widgets, we can’t just dump them on a page talking about Blue Matte Widgets (or ‘general widgets’) and expect them to stick around. Attention is the currency of today’s world, and if people don’t get what they want within a few seconds, they’ll just go straight to your competition, killing conversion rates and ROI. Relevance is paramount.

How to stand out from the competition, compel people to take action and maximise ROI

There are a range of things your website and landing page must do if you want to maximise enquiries, sales and ROI. Make sure you’re not giving away business to the competition by missing these conversion rate best practices:

1. Be sure to include a relevant and attention grabbing ‘hero image’ that builds instant credibility

If you are a service provider, one of the most simple yet powerful ‘hero images’ you can include is a shot of your whole team (even if it’s a team of one) standing in front of your signed company vehicles and/or business signage with BIG smiles on your dials. This is not a beauty contest. People really just want to see that you are a REAL business that looks trustworthy, friendly and approachable, and not just some cowboy operation. You can’t fake this, and it can often make a world of difference, helping prospective customers to instantly ‘connect’ with you and remove resistance in them taking the first step and getting in contact. Just remember that nice wide landscape orientation images taken from a good distance back often work best, so your website designer can crop in as needed. If you are a product or e-commerce based business including team shots can certainly still be powerful, but oftentimes having a strong ‘hero’ image that introduces your product range might be more important.

2. Include a punchy headline that tells people what you can offer them and what sets you apart

It’s SO important that prospective customers INSTANTLY know who you are, what you offer, and why you’re the best choice. So many businesses make the mistake of simply saying:

Welcome to Our Website

or perhaps just

XYZ Widgets

This is generally of little to no help to prospective customers. It just makes you look like everyone else and does nothing to spark people’s interest and give them reason to stick around. For best results we recommend putting together a punchy and compelling headline that grabs people’s attention and helps set you apart. For example:

Our Team of 15 XYZ Widget Makers Have Been Delivering Prompt & Affordable City Name Service for over 20 Years

See what we did there? By investing a minute or two, imagine how your headline could pop!

3. Provide details of what you can offer, and what the benefits are in dealing with you

✓ Who wants to read a 500 word wall of text just to understand what you offer?
✓ We strongly recommend using short, sharp bullet points
✓ This tends to be FAR more effective in communicating the basics
✓ And also in holding people’s attention
✓ What can you offer, what’s your service area and what are the benefits of dealing with you?

4. Include strong call to action buttons

Making it ‘stupidly simple’ and gently prompting people to take the next step helps to maximise enquiries. The last thing you want is for people to have to go looking for contact details or to wonder what the next step is, as that’s a guaranteed conversion killer.

We recommend including prominent attention grabbing buttons directly beneath your intro bullet points for [CALL 12 3456 7891] [Enquire Online] and making sure a call to action is always prominently visible somewhere on the page as you scroll down (for example including one as a part of each main section of your website). This helps to prompt and make it easy for prospective customers to take action and get in contact with you — or would you prefer that they just put off the decision, keep scrolling and go take action with your competition instead? Of course not! The aim then always need to be to make stupidly simple for people to do business with you.

5. Provide more detail

Once you’ve got the above basics right, you can then go into some more details for those who are interested in more specific details:

✓ Including an offer if appropriate to create a sense of urgency (Save this Month — Get a Bonus…)
✓ Reviews and testimonials from happy customers
✓ Photos of completed jobs, your team in action, before and after images etc
✓ How does your service work?
✓ etc

Making sure you get the basics right, as outlined above, can literally make or break. We take a huge amount of pride in our work, and work hard to tick every box when it comes to running a world class Google Ads campaign, and this is so, so important. But if we’re landing people onto a website which is not up to standard, and not following the above basic CRO best practices, then it can often all be for naught. In that case we’ll be fighting an uphill battle just to get Google Advertising to perform to a basic level. So please help us help you, and let’s get the basics right as outlined above. It really can make a world of difference and help us to run circles around the competition.