Do you ever wonder why some landing pages convert as high as 15% while others barely struggle to get any leads or sales? Well, over my last several years of experience in conversion rate optimization and landing page design, I've spent thousands of hours studying more than 1,500 plus landing pages to find out what actually makes them convert. Across the best landing pages I've seen in those last several years, I've noticed some very consistent patterns.
So today, I'll be sharing what I found and give you my seven most key learnings that you can apply to your own landing page to optimize your conversion rate and get more leads and sales than you've ever seen before. Starting with lesson number one, which is by far the most important, and that is what I call the 5-second rule. If you don't hook someone and make a strong first impression in the first 5 seconds of someone landing on your page, you've completely lost them.
That is why the topmost area of any landing page, also known as the above the fold, is complete make orb breakak. This is a section that's immediately visible without having to scroll down. And it is the only section that statistically 60% of people will never even scroll past, but 100% of your users will see.
You should be spending 80 to 90% of your efforts just on this one section when starting out. In order to nail down the above the fold, here's the proven formula. The very first thing is having an extremely benefit-driven and compelling headline that ties into the dream outcome of your end user.
Do not simply explain who you are or what it is you do in your headline. I see this mistake being made all the time on landing pages. Also, please do not use jargon or vague text that makes people have to process what you're trying to say.
This is absolutely killing your conversions and it's a complete waste of your headline and it's causing you to burn money down the drain. The only thing you need in your headline is why should I care? Right?
That's it. That's all you need. Just one hard-hitting benefit that makes people say, "Take my money.
" This is a great example for a bookkeeping client where we're highlighting value and quantifying the value in the form of time save. Right? That is what people care about at the end of the day.
Here's another example where in the before version of our client's page, they simply just explain who they are and what it is they do, which is a digital imaging technician course. Right? This adds no value to me as the end user.
In the after version, we tied in the dream outcome of the enduser and what they actually care about, right? Which is effectively more income, being able to travel the world and network with highprofile creatives. We've easily seen conversion rate increases at our agency at upwards of 80% just by testing the headline alone.
So, the next thing is your sub headline, right? Your sub headline is the opportunity to now explain who you are and what it is you do to achieve the results that you just mentioned in your headline. In the sub headline, you want to convey your USP and what makes your product or service different than any other competitor out there in the market.
The next big thing is having social proof above the fold, right? Social proof is anything like reviews, testimonials, featured publications, anything that's going to build trust with customers. Whenever you look at the world's highest converting landing pages, you will always notice that they put social proof right at the very top of their page because psychologically 60% of people never scroll past a section.
So you have to give them a reason and incentive to actually scroll down in the page and take action. And social proof is one of the ways you do that. Ideally, you want to have at least two forms of social proof above the fold.
We've just AB tested this a lot and we found that the more credibility you build up front, the higher likelihood someone is to convert. Next, you need a clear benefit-driven call to action button that stands out on the page and is actionable. Right underneath the call to action, you need to reduce what I call FUDs, which are fear, uncertainty, doubts.
Right? All of the anxieties and fears that people have around shopping online or reaching out about a service, you need to reduce all of that upfront above the fold. This could be anything like free trials or return policies or warranties.
You'd be surprised, but we've seen conversion rate increases between 40 to 60% just by testing this one small thing. So, these small little changes really make a difference. The final thing you need is an image or video that complements your messaging and subtly conveys who you are and what it is you do.
Here's a before and after for our education client where we incorporated all of these techniques and we saw a 132% lift in qualified leads and conversions. Here's another example for a client sold thrillers where we saw a 108% lift in qualified leads and conversions from just optimizing their above the fold. Now, having a strong above the fold is literally just the bare minimum and basic prerequisites of getting people to scroll down and engage and take action on your page.
But even despite giving them all of these logical reasons that they should take action, there's still going to be a large percentage of people that are not yet convinced. That is why lesson number two is that people buy with emotion, not logic. We like to think as humans that we're logical decision makers, but the reality is is that people tend to make decisions with emotion first, then they rationalize it with logic.
So when a person comes to your landing page, they're feeling something. Maybe they're frustrated by some deep rooted problem in their life, or maybe they're dreaming of an endstate improvement in their life. Whatever it may be, that is the feeling that you need to tap into on your page.
One of the easiest ways you can do this is through the form of images. Right? As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.
And this couldn't be more true for your landing page. The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text. We did this for education client who caters towards children where you can see scattered throughout the page are tons and tons of photos of smiling and happy children that really resonates with their target audience, which is parents, and really hits home.
This was one of the many changes that we made on this client's landing page that took them from a 2. 5% conversion rate to a 5% conversion rate on meta ads and basically book them out with leads. For this tanning e-commerce brand, we completely revamped their hero section in which the before barely had any emotional connection and in the after we featured a happy person smiling actually using their products which built that emotional connection and resulted in a massive lift in conversions.
The other way you can build this connection is through the use of powerful messaging. For our coaching client, his prospects struggled with dizziness and having to go through multiple physical therapists and multiple specialists. And so we highlighted this on the page through the form of powerful copy using the problem agitate solve framework where we basically first called out the problem.
Then we agitated it and really made people feel the problem and turned up the heat and then we presented the solution as a clear way out of their problem. This was one of the many changes that we made to the landing page that led to a 282% lift in conversions and leads. And we literally saw people convert right there and then just after seeing the section.
That's how powerful it is. When you combine the emotional appeal through colors, images, design, and copy, and you combine that with the logical appeal, that is the winning recipe for conversions. Speaking of conversions, lesson number three is that a long landing page does not kill conversions.
Bad structure does. There is so much debate online about what the perfect length for a landing page looks like and countless studies online claiming one thing or the other. I'm here to tell you that there is nothing wrong with a long landing page as long as every section is adding value and getting people one step closer to conversion.
I think people tend to forget, right? Long gone are the days with Google ads and Facebook ads that you can just throw up an ad and you'll start generating leads. There's no world in today's day and age where someone who knows nothing about your business, nothing about your brand, and nothing about your offer is just going to magically click on your ad and convert straight away.
The ad is simply just to get the click. At the end of the day, your landing page is what needs to do the selling. And you need to treat your landing page like it's a saleserson.
This means you need to have multiple value props, right? Multiple social proof sections, multiple sections where you're addressing people's fear, uncertainty, objections, and multiple sections where you're explaining to the customer why you're the absolute best fit and best solution for their problem to get them over the edge to convert. Some of the best landing pages that we've ever created at our agency are multiple sections long with tons of value props, tons of social proof, and tons of case studies.
Following this principle, you need to be very careful and conscious about what you're going to hide in a carousel on mobile and hide in drop-own menus because they'll statistically get very very low engagement rates. Basically following the notion that what is hidden will not get seen. That is why whenever you look at our landing pages on mobile, we always expose the reviews and we never hide them in a carousel or in a drop down because we want to force people to consume those reviews, right?
We want them to see those. Lesson number four is that people don't read, they scan. People will only read 20% of the content on your website.
The other 80% they just scan. So people are just skimming your page and are trying to look for answers quickly and efficiently. So the question is, how do you make sure that people get the information they need without getting lost in the noise?
It starts with structuring your landing pages in a way that's easy to scan. You need to utilize things like headings and subheadings. Bullet points to highlight the main value props like these examples here and bolding text to emphasize certain items, especially for your headlines.
Right? This is something I see brands messing up all of the time. They use generic headlines like here's what we do, what makes us unique, how it works, or our services.
Because of the fact that people don't read, they scan. You need to operate under the framework that somebody will only read the headlines on your landing page alone. Just imagine they don't even read any of the body text on your page.
Is the benefit clear and communicative in just the headline alone. So instead of what makes us unique, just simply say what makes you unique in the headline itself so that they can quickly scan it. The key here is to think like a reader, not a writer.
What's the one thing that people should know at a glance? put that front and center. Lesson number five is that you need to use social proof that's actually proof.
Social proof is anything like reviews, testimonials, anything that's going to build trust. Everyone in this industry says the same generic advice that you need to use social proof. Social proof.
Social proof. Put it at the top. Put it here.
Social proof is going to build trust. And 100% social proof does help with conversions. It's statistically backed.
But what's happening now in the marketplace is that everyone is using social proof so much so that people have gotten very very skeptical. The classic example these days are the featured on logos. People have become subconsciously so numb to this because they see it so often on every single page.
For example, this e-commerce brand literally has the same three logos being repeated on this carousel which erodess all sense of trust with me and this brand entirely. I would not shop here if I see this. What I recommend instead is taking those same featured on logos and adding a quote from the actual publication or the place that it was featured on to build that extra layer of credibility and trust.
We did this for a client WMDC where they were featured on all of these different places like the Joe Rogan podcast and we just added a little snippet of what was said on all of these publications to build that extra layer of credibility. and we saw a 38% lift in conversions from just that one tiny change. Another one is putting reviews without any details.
I mean, this could literally be anyone, right? Without putting a photo of the person or any verifiable details, I'm just not going to trust this company. And especially if I'm coming from Facebook ads or cold traffic, I'm not going to build that connection with the brand, right?
Cuz this review could easily be fabricated and fake. Now, compare that to this where I have actual examples and images of the people that have used a product that I can actually verify and it looks 10 times more credible and is going to be way more likely to convert cold traffic. People trust reviews a lot more when you put a name of the person leaving the review and a photo of the person and also the source in which the review was left.
Whether it's Google, Capira, whatever it may be, it's actually verifiable. somebody can go and check to see if that review is legitimate or not. Lesson number six is that visual hierarchy is your best friend.
This is basically the art of guiding a user's attention and the flow of information from the most important elements to the least important. I always like to use this graphic when explaining it to clients. Using things like font, size, weight, color, etc.
, you can guide people's attentions to where you want it to go from the most prioritized elements to the least prioritized. Here's examples of what not to do with these poorly put together landing pages where, you know, there's so many elements on the page that I have no idea where to look at and what to do first and where my eye should go first. There's no clear distinction between body text, between headlines, between CT buttons.
It's all over the place. The other issue is that there's way too much on the page. I always like to go by the mantra that less is more.
In other words, when you give people too much choice, it equals no choice at all. This is especially true when it comes to landing pages and design, right? When you give people way too many options, too many buttons, too many texts, too many links, too many things that they can do, they're going to enter a state of analysis paralysis where they won't know what to do next, and they're most likely just going to completely exit your page.
Here's a real life example of this in action. In the before version for a client, they didn't have any visual hierarchy. the red clashed with one another.
The headline was subdued. It wasn't prominent on the page. It didn't stand out and there was no sense of attention.
Everything was kind of competing for attention at once. In the after version, we fixed all of this and created a clear flow of information from the headline to the sub headline to the CTA button to create that sense of hierarchy. And what we saw was a 64% lift in the conversion rate.
Here's another example for our client where there's a clear flow of information from top to bottom, right? The headline is a different color. It's bold.
It stands out on the page. The sub headline is a different color. It's subdued.
It's less prominent. And then you have a nice big CTA button that stands out on the page, right? There's a clear flow of information.
Lesson number seven, simplicity beats creativity every single time. It's super easy to fall into the trap of making your landing page stand out with flashy design, quirky copy, and unconventional layouts. But if that creativity comes at the cost of clarity, you're going to lose conversions.
There's actually a concept in CRO and UX design called Jacob's law, which basically states that people expect a landing page or website to look and feel and function on a similar level to what they're already familiar with because they spend a lot of time on other websites. And so when you look at this example here, right, it completely deviates from a common design pattern to what most people are used to. There's two different headlines instead of one.
There's social proof that is gigantic on the page and underneath the headline and then the body text is completely separate and far away from the headline further down in the page or these examples here where they simply have a headline with no body text and no CTA button whatsoever. All in the hopes of achieving minimalism. Just cut all of this out, right?
Just stick with the basics and what people are already used to. If you care about conversions, that means one clear headline, one clear body text in close proximity to the headline, social proof right at the very top of the site, your CTA button right underneath. You're going to reduce your FUDs underneath the CTA button, and then you're going to have an image or video.
So, in this video, I went over what's working right now and some of my key learnings. And now you could go and make your own landing page based on what I've shown you here. Or you could click right here to watch the next one where I apply all of my best learnings to build a real landing page for my own business.
And because it's a real landing page that I'm actively using for my agency, I'm not holding anything back.
