The Anatomy of a High-Converting Webinar Landing Page

How do you create a webinar landing page that gets results?

You need your landing page to attract the right audience, convince them to sign up and to become an “evergreen” page, continually drawing traffic to your website. Those are some big jobs to fill! Your landing page needs to be a key part of your webinar marketing strategy.

It all starts with building your webinar landing page intentionally, using some best practices to achieve those goals. Here’s what you need to consider:

Know your keywords

One major strategy to draw traffic to any sort of web page is to ensure that it is SEO-friendly. Webinar landing pages are no different and you can start by doing keyword research to know which words will be the most relevant to your topic and potential audience.

Importantly, SEO is a long-term strategy - you’ll benefit from using those keywords later on when you want people to find the page for webinar replays and related content. The time to start is now, as SEO tends to be a slow-burn. It takes a while for search engines to crawl your site and to improve the rankings of your pages.

Where do these keywords come from? A good place to start is to consider the needs or desires of your audience with regard to the topic of your webinar. What are they likely to search for? Use a keyword tool such as Google Keyword Planner to get suggestions. You might also choose to use a tool such as Clearscope, which will give you a list of related keywords for your chosen main keyword.

Other SEO strategies

Your keywords are a great place to start with SEO, followed by a few other strategies:

• Use a custom URL for your webinar landing page that includes your keyword phrase.
• Include keywords in your webinar's title.
• Use keywords strategically on your page. For example, include them in the title tag, meta descriptions, header tags and image file names.
• Get other people to link to your landing page. This is not only great for immediate promotion, but for adding SEO value through backlinks later on. The caveat for SEO (and let’s face it, your reputation) is that those links should be from “quality” sources. This means they should at least be semi-related to your topic and should not be poor-quality, spammy websites.
• Ensure that you have good page speed. This is a known SEO ranking factor, which makes sense when you consider that people don’t want to hang about, waiting for a page to slowly load. You can take steps such as ensuring you have clean coding, optimized image and file sizes and that you’re not running cumbersome scripts.

Knowing your keywords and SEO strategy helps form a good structure for your landing page from the start.

Have an engaging USP

Your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) is what Olly Gardner of Unbounce describes as one of the five essential elements of a winning landing page. Your USP identifies why a person should be interested in you and what makes you different from everyone else. What will set you apart enough to drive someone to sign up for your webinar? What’s in it for them?

As Gardner says, your USP can then be communicate-hosting-tips through key elements of your landing page:

• The main headline
• Your subheadline
• Your supporting text or media content.

For example, a USP could be: “discover the best way to create a high-converting webinar.” What makes us different? We’ve discovered the “best” strategies, better than the rest (you get the idea).

Write an attractive headline

Headlines that grab the attention of your target audience are a great place to start for attracting conversions. There is a tendency for people to skim headlines. According to Copyblogger, around 80% of people will read your headline, but only 20% will read anything else on your page. You have to grab and hold the reader’s attention early.

So, what makes a headline attractive? There are actually a number of different techniques that you could use to come up with an attention-worthy headline. One technique, taught by AWAI is known as “The Four U’s.” All headlines (or subheadlines) should:

1. Be USEFUL to the reader
2. Provide them with a sense of URGENCY
3. Convey the idea that the main benefit is somehow UNIQUE
4. Do all of the above in an ULTRA-SPECIFIC way

In terms of usefulness, consider a key benefit or problem for the audience that your webinar promises to help them gain or solve. Urgency could be anything that pushes the audience to act quickly, for example, perhaps they need to know this information “before you file your taxes.” The unique part will relate back to your USP, and being ultra-specific might include defining who the webinar is for (e.g. “before you file your small business taxes”).

If you need inspiration for headline writing, there are some great resources out there. For example, renowned copywriter, Bob Bly outlines eight key headline categories in the book The Copywriter’s Handbook. Copywriting is a learned skill - the best writers have spent years honing their craft. You may also want to hire a copywriter to make sure you really nail the copy on your landing page.

Create an intriguing body copy

The body copy of your webinar landing page refers to the areas where you can include the details about your webinar. Make sure that the copy is engaging and includes all of the salient points for why people should attend your webinar.

Marketers can get caught up on copy length, particularly if they believe that longer-form will be better for SEO. However, Instapage points out that page length shouldn’t be the main focus - there is only a vague correlation with SEO. The most important thing is to communicate your message clearly and entice people to sign up. This might take 1200 words, but it also might only take 100 (experimenting with long vs. short-form copy is something you can and should test).

Here are some tips for your landing page body copy:

• Make it easy to read. Include elements that make it skimmable, such as bullet points, bold words and use of subheadlines.
• Clearly communicate the benefits of your webinar.
• Show an understanding of the key issues that present a challenge or problem to your audience.
• Avoid sounding like an infomercial or any kind of oversell. Tell people exactly what they will get out of it and why that will benefit them.
• Speak directly to the audience, for example saying “you.”
• Use “trust elements” such as customer testimonials or bios of key speakers.
• Remember those keywords!

Have a clear call to action

Have you ever landing on a web page and been confused about what it’s asking you to do? Key mistakes on landing pages include too many instructions or unclear next steps. Tell people exactly what you want them to do!

This means you should have an obvious CTA (call to action). For example:

• Click here to claim your spot in this webinar
• Yes! Sign me up for the webinar
• RSVP here to attend the webinar.
• Register.

The CTA should be very visible and visual. Your landing page might have a big, obvious button to click with the CTA, or, you might have a CTA as a headline to a signup form embedded on the page.

It’s important to only have one goal for your webinar landing page, and that’s getting people to sign up for it. If you try to include other things, such as a pitch for other products or services, you’ll blur the key objective. Keep your page as clean as possible.

Update the page after your webinar

Remember how we talked about SEO being a “slow burn?” This is why you can make the best use of your landing page by keeping it up (preserving its SEO value) and updating it to be “evergreen.” This simply means that the page doesn’t date - a person could land on it at any time and discover relevant, valuable content. This adds value both to your business and to the potential customer.

Here are a few steps for updating your page afterward:

1. Remove any reference to dates and times
2. Update the CTA, especially if you want to “gate” the replay of the webinar so that you build your email list from it. So for example, you might have a new CTA along the lines of “sign up here to view this webinar now.”
3. Add snippets of webinar content to the page to update the text and improve SEO value.
4. Ensure you have edited the webinar if necessary, especially if time-bound offers were made at the end. (In saying that, it’s better to have something that you can offer all who view the webinar, whether they saw it live or on demand).
5. Make sure the page is shareable by including buttons to share to social media. This encourages people to share with their networks, potentially gaining you a wider audience.

Final thoughts

Building a high-converting webinar landing page starts by being strategic about what your goals are. It’s a good idea to include a longer-term view, looking at how you can boost SEO value and use the page to gain conversions, even after the webinar has been completed.

Put yourself in the shoes of the audience you want to attract and consider how you will 1) grab their attention in the first place and 2) urge them to take action. A core understanding of why your webinar will matter and what benefits the audience will gain is important for this.

Finally, if you need help to create an effective landing page, look for someone like a seasoned copywriter who knows how to write for conversions. In the end, this page exists to get people to take action - you need to ensure that it is built to support that goal.

Ready to start running great webinars? Check out Demio and start running webinars that convert.