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When visitors drop by your landing pages, what happens? If you’re making any of these deadly mistakes, they probably aren’t converting. Instead, they’re backing out of your website, and you never hear from them again.
Here are the top 7 landing page mistakes to avoid.

1. No strong headline—As soon as someone clicks on your landing page, they should see a strong, benefit-rich headline that lets them know they’re in the right place and they stand to benefit by doing business with you. Simply put, your headline needs to be strong enough to get the visitor to read on. If it lacks a benefit or is unclear, most visitors will instantly back out of your site.

2. Content buried below the fold—According to a new Nielsen study, web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. This means you need to place your most important information above the fold so visitors don’t have to scroll down to see it. Put your most important benefits up top as well as your call to action so visitors know what you offer and what they need to do next.

3. No call to action—Speaking of the call to action, if you don’t have one, you’re screwed. How can you expect visitors to take action if you don’t tell them what you want them to do? You need to have a strong, clear call to action that guides the visitor to the next step. I recommend placing one call to action in every screen view so that visitors always have a way to take action, no matter where they are on your site.

4. Too many options—It’s a myth that customers want choices. Landing page case studies have shown time and time again that offering too many options actually overwhelms visitors and causes them to take no action at all. Ideally, there should be just one thing you want visitors to do, but having two options (e.g. different packages) is also acceptable.

5. Nothing that builds trust—Online shoppers are a skeptical bunch. If they’ve never heard of you, they won’t trust you at first. Your job is to eliminate risk and to build their trust. You can do this by featuring customer testimonials, guaranteeing satisfaction, and offering a good return policy.

6. Paths guiding the visitor off site—How can you expect visitors to convert if you’re dropping links that take them to other pages? You don’t want to give landing page visitors a way out. Everything should be guiding the visitor toward conversion. Anything that does otherwise is like a leak that lets conversions seep out.

7. Difficult to scan copy—Online users tend to scan content in an F-shaped pattern. This means you need to make your copy easy to scan. You can accomplish this by using bulleted and numbered lists, short paragraphs, subheadings, and bolded phrases throughout your copy.

There’s one more thing I’d like to add. The key to continually increasing your landing page conversion rate is to never stop testing. You should always be tweaking various aspects of your landing page and testing them side by side to see what else you can do to get more conversions. The second you stop testing and experimenting is the second you get stagnant and stunt your future growth.
What are some other deadly landing page mistakes you’d add to this list?