Community
4,763 views
Landing pages are a strange beast: the fusion of artistry, creativity, and hard science. You have to tell a story while paying strict attention to everything from the kinds of words you use to the colour of the clickable buttons you show on screen. The only thing more difficult than crafting the perfect landing page is doing it on mobile when factors such as less real estate make it harder to work with than on desktop.
Difficult doesn’t mean impossible, though! The right thought process and design tweaks can move the conversion needle on your business’ mobile landing pages.
The benefits of improving your landing page SEO should be obvious, but it never hurts to remind ourselves why this is worth doing. The better your landing page, the more likely you are to turn new leads into customers. A cleverly built landing page will also have a better organic ranking since Google tracks things like bounce rate and engagement. That directly correlates to less wasteful spending on paid search or other types of ads. Lastly, a better mobile landing page means you have more chances to create long-lasting relationships with loyal customers.
There is no one-size-fits-all landing page methodology. What tends to be true is that a combination of simple yet commanding visuals, intuitive design, and a clearly defined call to action are the building blocks for a solid landing page experience. In this post, I’m going to guide you through 8 benefits of improving landing pages for mobile. Let’s get optimized!
1. Retire “Responsive”
It’s time to face the facts: your mobile visitors are essentially a different species than your desktop visitors. Their motivations and goals are entirely different, as are the ways they want to use your site. Website visitors have a screen that is about 10 times bigger, they usually have more time, and they’re willing and able to look around your site for what they need, maybe even scrolling to the very bottom of your very long home page. Mobile users, on the other hand, typically have one goal in mind, they don’t want it to take forever to find it, and they’re browsing on a screen so small that they hate being crowded with useless information.
Knowing all that, why would you simply make your desktop site “responsive” to mobile users? Instead, design a completely separate landing page for mobile users that is tailored to what they want and need. Don’t try to make your desktop design fit the mobile mould.
2. Consider colour
When designing your mobile site, you may not have thought further than ensuring that the colour scheme meshes with your brand’s vibe. If that’s true, you need to think about how you can use colour as a tool on your mobile landing page to capture more customers.
This goes back to the point above: Visitors have such a small screen that they hate extraneous information and love any clues you can give them to lead them where they want to go. colour can be used as an amazing visual cue to help them find that call to action button — show them where to sign up, learn more, or buy with a nice big colourful button that clearly stands out on the page. At worst, having everything too monotone or too cluttered will cause your visitors to bounce — at best, easy-to-find information can boost your conversion rate.
3. Shorten the Scroll
Before your mobile visitor gets a finger cramp, consider the logic behind putting whatever they need at the very bottom of a miles-long landing page. We get it; you have a lot of information you want them to know — but do they really need all of it?
If you’ve heard of “above the fold” — the concept of the important news appearing on the top half of the newspaper above where it was folded — you can translate that message to a mobile landing page, where the fold is the bottom of the page that they can see without scrolling.
In the case of landing pages, shorter is almost always better. It means you have a concise point of view and you’ve trimmed it down to just what you think they’ll need. The rest of the information can go on other pages that can be easily found on the navigation bar if they need it.
4. Lighten the Load Time
I’ll put it this way: Your visitors will not wait for your page to load. There’s nothing worse than staring at a blank white page and a frozen loading bar, and people have no patience for it anymore. Consider two very interesting facts: 1) The average load time for a mobile page is 15 seconds, and 2) When load time increases from 1 second to 10 seconds, the likelihood of the visitor bouncing increases 123%.
In other words, do everything you can to increase your load time. Ideally, you should be shooting for 1 to 3 seconds and no more than that. Longer than 3 seconds increases the likelihood of bouncing to 53%. What’s an easy way to decrease your load time. Read on:
5. Ditch the Imagery
This one sounds counterintuitive, but you do not need tons of images or videos to make your page interesting, exciting, or useful. Not only will loading a bunch of images slow down the load time of your page, but it’s ultimately unnecessary for a landing page. Aim for simple and visually pleasing with very few images, or none at all.
When it comes to video, if you decide you absolutely cannot live without it, make it captioned, short, and not on autoplay. Eighty-five percent of viewers watch videos on mute, most people are not going to want to sit through a whole video, and no one wants to frantically try to find the auto-play video before it eats up all their data (or blasts their eardrums). They may be on slow wifi or no wifi at all, and you’ll want to keep that in mind. They can find your portfolio on a different page if they want to see it.
6. Don’t Forget the Funnel
What are you using this landing page for? Don’t lose sight of where in the sales funnel your leads are, and how that relates to the purpose of this landing page. If it’s a general landing page that you’re constructing for first-time leads, it makes sense to use general keywords that they’re more likely to be searching. If your leads will be further down the funnel by the time they get to your mobile page, you’ll probably want to use long-tail keywords so that you’ll show up in more specific searches.
7. Simplify
Your mobile landing page is not the place for the first chapter of your business’s autobiography. Even blocks of text that don’t seem too long when you’re writing them down can quickly become unmanageable on mobile — a headline that seems short could end up taking up the entire mobile screen with a bigger header size.
Instead, make sure to simplify the information and make it easy to skim and find. Bullet points can help the reader focus on small bursts of information, subheaders break up the text into manageable topical pieces, and generous spacing will let the reader’s eyes rest. Basically, avoid the wall of text.
8. Make Space for White Space
Related to the point above, it’s important to incorporate white space into your design. It isn’t just nicer to look at, but it actually tangibly improves the visitor’s experience: you can increase comprehension up to 20% by simply increasing the space between lines and on the margins.
Conclusion
It’s not hard to create a great mobile landing page that visitors will love, but a lot of businesses don’t think it’s worth it to put in the time. After all, they already have a regular desktop website. Why can’t they use that for mobile users too? The critical thing here to remember is that your mobile visitors aren’t the same as your desktop ones, and you need to treat them differently if you want to take advantage of the potential that mobile visitors bring properly.
After reviewing these tips, hopefully, you can see that there are quite a few changes you can make to your mobile landing pages better. It’s worth the time and capital if that means more conversions and better outcomes.
This excellent blog was splendidly insightful! It provided practical tips that I’m excited to implement to improve user engagement and conversions on my mobile site. Thank you for sharing such magnificent advice.