Your entire digital marketing strategy is built to accomplish one main goal – to get high-quality traffic pouring into your website. True, there are lots of other things you’re looking to accomplish along the way, like visibility, trust, and a stellar reputation but it’s all done in hopes of generating a surge in traffic. Knowing this, you’ve done everything you can to make sure you have a top-notch website that will greet each new visitor, introduce them to your brand and nurture a relationship. It’s a lot of work, but worth it.
Considering the effort many businesses put into their websites, it’s always a bit of a head-scratcher to learn that they haven’t put the same effort into the first place where many visitors receive their first introduction – the incredibly important landing page.
Well-designed landing pages are an essential component of any PPC campaign. Your landing pages are your chance to greet a targeted audience and encourage them to take the next important step towards conversion. If your landing pages aren’t designed to do this, then it’s practically guaranteed that your PPC campaign will fall flat.
There are steps you can take to maximize the performance of your PPC campaigns, and it all starts with following some simple rules that will help you design the perfect pay-per-click landing page.

Keep Multitasking to a Minimum

Landing pages aren’t like the rest of your website. Take for instance all the different ways your homepage performs – it introduces your brand, encourages exploration, and points visitors in all the different directions they can take when discovering what you’re about. This is fine for a home page but expecting your landing pages to do the same thing can prove to be a fatal flaw.
Landing pages should be designed to do one thing, and one thing only – encourage the visitor to take the next step. This could be anything from signing up for a newsletter or downloading an eBook to subscribing to a podcast. It’s a common mistake to think that this is a good time to encourage the visitor to take a look at your product selection or read your latest blog post. The only thing you’ll accomplish by suggesting these additional actions is distracting the visitor and pulling them away from what you really want them to be doing.
Instead, put a limit on what you’re expecting out of your landing pages. Choose one action and devote each landing page to that action alone. Keeping visitors focused and limiting distracting elements is an easy way of upping the performance of your landing pages.

Don’t Just Tell Them, Show Them

The problem that some businesses encounter with their landing pages is that they have a ton of information that they want to communicate but know that the very nature of a landing page limits their ability to do so. Start plugging in lengthy blocks of text or too many informational points and you’re going to lose your visitor’s interest. Fortunately, there’s a way that you can provide valuable information to each visitor without distracting them from the core intent of the page. If you haven’t already guessed, we’re talking about video.
You’ve heard the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. That’s nothing compared to the 1.8 million words that every minute of video is worth. At first, this seems impossible but think about everything that video does. Quality video not only informs, but it also helps the viewer connect to the brand on an emotional level, establishes trust, and can be the first step in building a long-lasting customer relationship. In other words, video is extremely powerful.
There are lots of great ways to use video on your landing pages, as long as you remember to keep the goal in mind. For example, a real estate agency that is running a PPC campaign to generate interest in a specific market could feature a landing page video about the benefits of living in the targeted community. Likewise, a consulting firm could highlight the benefits of their service for a landing page designed to generate email leads.

Speed Is Key

It’s no secret that page speed is important for SEO. Internet users have become accustomed to sites that load super-fast, no matter what device they’re using, and everyone is saying that you’ll start to lose visitors if your page load time exceeds a mere 2 seconds. When you’re designing your PPC campaign, it’s important to remember that page speed matters for landing pages too.
One could argue that page speed is even more important on landing pages. Many times, a landing page is a visitor’s first impression, plus you’re directing them to a page where you’re going to ask them to take a specific action. It’s up to you to provide the comfort and usability factors that will make them want to stay, and speed is one of the most important.

Keep the Focus on the Customer

You have plenty of opportunities on your website to tell customers everything you want them to know about your business. Your landing page isn’t one of them. Landing pages shouldn’t be used as a platform for telling the visitor how great you are. Instead, you need to be using them to demonstrate the value you provide and why the visitor needs you in their life.
Stay away from “about us” content on your landing pages and focus on providing a solution to the visitor’s needs and pain points. While you’re at it, make the process easy for them by keeping the design clean, clearly stating the value message or call to action, and not overcomplicating the lead generation process with difficult-to-find links or unclear language.
Would you like to know more about designing the perfect PPC landing page to bring new leads to your door? We offer the web design services that you need to maximize the results of your PPC campaign. Contact JLB and speak to one of our professionals about what it takes to design the perfect landing page today.