Stick The Landing | Writing and Testing Your Firm's Landing Page

Submitted by Patrick on Thu, 02/15/2018 - 09:19

Congratulations, you’ve started a great online marketing campaign! You’ve picked a great keyword, set a great bid, written a great ad, and gotten a great click. Now you just need to stick the landing with a great landing page.

A landing page is what users will see when they click on one of your paid ads on Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Your landing page is the last obstacle between securing that new client or losing them.

It’s important for your firm to have top-performing landing pages in order maximize your return on ad spend. Here are some tips for writing and testing great landing pages.

Structure

Writing for the web is very different than legal writing. For instance, your paragraphs need to be short and easy to read. A landing page isn’t an essay, it’s a flier. Potential clients want only the meat of the message, presented clearly. For example, which would you rather read:

1.) Text that looks like this?

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Cras semper auctor neque vitae. Mattis pellentesque id nibh tortor id aliquet lectus. Elementum curabitur vitae nunc sed. Tortor consequat id porta nibh venenatis cras sed felis. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur. Odio eu feugiat pretium nibh ipsum consequat nisl vel. Ut etiam sit amet nisl purus in mollis nunc. Enim blandit volutpat maecenas volutpat. Feugiat pretium nibh ipsum consequat nisl vel pretium lectus quam."

2.) Or text that looks like this?

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Cras semper auctor neque vitae.

Mattis pellentesque id nibh tortor id aliquet lectus. Elementum curabitur vitae nunc sed.

Tortor consequat id porta nibh venenatis cras sed felis. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur. Odio eu feugiat pretium nibh ipsum consequat nisl vel.

Ut etiam sit amet nisl purus in mollis nunc. Enim blandit volutpat maecenas volutpat. Feugiat pretium nibh ipsum consequat nisl vel pretium lectus quam”

Users almost always pick the second option. Both have the exact same text, but when copy is structured in one big block, it can be intimidating to readers—especially when read on a screen.

Breaking up your paragraphs encourages potential clients to read your content. As a loose rule of thumb, a paragraph on a landing page should only contain one to three sentences.

Using bullets and numbered lists is also encouraged. Lastly, bolding important text can be a great way to highlight the key points of your message.

Content

Did you know that 50% of Americans read at an eighth-grade level? That means if you include language in your landing pages which an eighth grader wouldn’t understand, then half your potential customers will be excluded from your message.

When writing landing pages, it is important to keep the complexity of your language simple so that you engage the widest audience possible.

This doesn’t mean your writing can’t be neat, concise, or professional. You only need a fourth-grade education to read The Old Man and The Sea. Your landing page should be very clear and easy to read while still resonating with users and highlighting the benefits of working with your firm.

Test, Test, Test

We know a good landing page should have short, concise paragraphs and clean, easy-to-understand writing, but what next? How many words should you have? Should you try to include very general language to attract as many claimants as you can, or use very specific language to generate higher-quality cases? Should you include images? Should you bullet paragraphs or leave them be?

The best part about marketing is that there are no hard and fast answers to these types of questions. There may be “best practices,” but depending on your area of law and your client base, some strategies will work better than others.

Because there are no rules, you have the freedom to try anything. When trying new strategies, it is important to test your changes and find the top performing landing page for your firm.

The best way to test landing pages is by using “A/B Testing,” or testing a key change in a landing page by running the original page and the changed page at the same time and seeing which performs better.

The key metric to track is the conversion rate, which is the number of clients signed divided by the number of visits to your landing page. A landing page which has 2 visits and has generated 1 new client has a conversion rate of 50%.

A/B Testing Example

Let’s say you want to test two different headlines and see which performs better. You create two landing pages that are identical except the headline. Headline A says, “Welcome,” and headline B says, “A Law Firm You Can Trust.”

After running the two different headlines on identical ads for two weeks, you find headline A generated 3 clients from 46 visits and headline B generated 15 clients from 98 visits.

Doing some quick math, you find headline A generated a client roughly 7% of the time, while headline B generated a client roughly 15% of the time. Based on the results of this test, you should now run all your ads using headline B.

If you want to get even more accurate results you, can put your data into an A/B test calculator like one found at conversioner.com. These calculators estimate the certainty your new landing page will help or harm your conversion rate. You should shoot for ninety-five percent certainty to be confident your changes will affect the conversion rate.

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