KISS Principle: Keep It Short Scholar

A landing page is any page on your web-site where you might expect a prospective customer to land. This means almost every page of your web-site. The only exceptions are pages that are only accessible AFTER an action is performed (such as subscribing, a sign in, a purchase confirmation page, etc.)

You may also have content pages where you aren’t expecting immediate action so you don’t consider them landing pages. This blog might be an example of a page that is technically a landing page (you can get here from a search engine or a link on another site), but wouldn’t normally be optimized as a landing page. This is because it is meant to provide information rather than to persuade a particular action like subscribing or purchasing a particular product.

The biggest mistake that people make with their landing pages is that they make them too long. We studied thousands of profitable and unprofitable websites who advertised on Google, Yahoo or Bing. Once we extracted all of the HTML off their landing pages and compressed the extra spaces, we found the following average lengths:

Profitable Page Length: 1,667 characters
Unprofitable Page Length: 1,750 characters

Both are much shorter than might be expected. The profitable pages are even shorter than the unprofitable pages!

In number of words, profitable pages averaged only 278 words of an average of five characters each. Most landing pages will use a longer average word length, so the average number of words is even less than 278 for the entire page!

This length includes all of your navigation and fixed template text. That is all text you have to capture the average prospect’s attention and get them to take action… an absolute maximum of 278 words!

The most important thing you can do to improve your landing page is to say more with fewer words. The scoring software we use cuts off scoring after that critical length. You can see the words that were scored in your website evaluation report under Factor 3. The words on your landing page after those shown on your report simply don’t matter. The average prospect will never read them. Optimize the first 278 words to get your message across and ask for the action you want them to take.

That is how profitable online businesses do the job. That is how you have to do the job if you want to join the club of profitable online businesses!