Three cautions for designing landing pages

Landing pages are crucial components of small business website design, because they generate the most traffic and stand the biggest chance of converting a sale.

However, landing pages are also frequently designed incorrectly. Entrepreneurs – specifically, those without much experience selling on the web – tend to make them overly complex, broad or difficult to use. Avoiding these potential pitfalls is crucial to creating a landing page that does what it's supposed to – sell products.

1. Don't distract customers

The landing page is frequently the last area of the site consumers visit before making a purchase. Because of this, some small business owners get greedy – they ask consumers to sign up for email marketing newsletters, follow them on Facebook or Twitter, consider purchasing other items or perform a variety of other behaviors.

This can be detrimental as it distracts customers from making a purchase. Say, for example, they click through to a company's Facebook page and end up just browsing their newsfeed. That could be a lost sale for the business simply because it was concerned with making the shopper a long-term customer rather than converting a sale.

Small businesses should keep their landing pages relatively distraction free. All that needs to be there is copy that sells products and a well-crafted call to action. Nothing more, nothing less.

"Don't leave shredded cheese around your mousetrap; put it all in a block on top of that pressure-sensitive leg-breaker," SEOmoz asserts. "If it isn't contributing to conversions, it shouldn't be there."

2. Avoid unnecessary barriers

Another pitfall many small business owners encounter with their landing pages is adding obstacles that prevent sales from occurring. Unlike the previously mentioned distractions, obstacles are hard stops to the shopping experience.

For example, many retailers force users to register with their websites before allowing them to place products in their digital shopping carts. Another commonly used tactic is placing whitepapers and other valuable content behind forms that require visitors to enter their names and email addresses.

While obtaining this information is important for future marketing efforts, it should never come at the cost of a sale. Small businesses should seek to make the buying process as painless as possible, this will ensure customers aren't put off from making purchase decisions.

"Some will argue and say 'but the less info you get about [prospects], the less targeted your leads are.' The landing page is not the place to weed out the non-committals; that's what content, SEO, PPC … is for," the news source adds. "If you're getting a whole lot of leads who just drop an email address and don't convert, then you need to reevaluate how you're getting people to your site."

3. Test, test, test

It doesn't matter how well-designed a landing page is, small business owners will never be able to maximize their sales if they don't test different variations of them. Few things in life are perfect on the first go, and this is especially the case with landing pages. Changing the font type, the color of the background, the images used – these subtle modifications can have huge ramifications on sales.

"Your choice of what to test will obviously depend on your goals," Smash Magazine explains. "For example, if your goal is to increase the number of sign-ups, then you might test the following: length of the sign-up form, types of fields in the form, display of privacy policy, 'social proof,' etc."

However, having a system is also crucial to successful testing. Changes can't just be made on a whim, or else entrepreneurs won't be able to tell which alterations had an impact. 

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