The landing page – that mystical, magical wonder promising hoardes of qualified leads chomping at the bit to buy your stuff. So what to do when your landing pages aren’t delivering the goods? How do you get your lead generation program back on track?

Make sure you aren’t guilty of any of these seven deadly sins that are sure to kill the conversion rate on your pages.

Sin #1: No Offer or Weak Offer

Make sure that your landing page offers visitors something of value in exchange for their information. The offer on your landing page has to be compelling enough to warrant someone doing the work of filling out your form to get it. Answer the question: What’s in it for me?

Sin #2: No Response Form or the Form is Below the Fold

This is my personal all-time pet peeve of landing page design. I’ve seen an offer. I liked the offer. I click the link to redeem the offer and… I can’t find the response form.

Your prospects have done about as much work as they’re willing to do. Make sure your landing page has a form and that it’s visible as soon as the page loads.

Sin #3: Call to Action is MIA

Befriend the big red button (or blue button, or orange button or…). Too often, landing pages are so focused on telling visitors everything they could ever possibly want to know that they forget their main purpose – to ask visitors for their contact details. A landing page without a call-to-action is akin to a salesman never asking for the sale. It’s a wasted effort.

Make your calls to action large, prominent and impossible to miss. And be clear and succinct about what you want your visitors to do.

Sin #4: Copy Is Written from the Corporate Perspective

Your visitors buy from you to solve their problems and for no other reason. The only thing your landing pages should talk about is what problems they have and how whatever you are offering will help them to solve those problems. Educate them about your products, their features, and benefits later. Don’t try to cram an entire microsite onto a single page in the hope that you can bore them into a sale. Right now, it’s all about them.

Sin #5: Headlines Don’t Match the Offer

People usually arrive at your landing pages by clicking on a link – either on your site, a paid search ad or one that they find somewhere else on the web. Wherever they found that link, they were responding to the offer that it implied. Make sure that the headlines on your landing page match up with the wording you use to describe it elsewhere on the web. If you don’t, visitors might not recognize what they’re looking for and leave without ever really considering your offer.

Sin #6: Failing to Establish Credibility

These days anyone can hang out a shingle claiming to be an expert and promise information in exchange for contact details. And most anyone does. Visitors to your site need to know that they can trust the expertise you claim to have. And they want to be reassured that giving your their contact information isn’t going to start a deluge of spam emails and incessant phone calls form the sales team.

Your landing page must establish your credibility. There are several ways to achieve this, Here are just a few ideas:

include written or video testimonials from your customers,

highlight awards, credentials or media coverage you’ve received

for product demos, offer a comparison chart that highlights key features of your products against those of a well known competitor

include access to free samples – share the table of contents or first chapter of an ebook or research report for example

Sin #7: Form is Too Long

Make sure that you ask for only as much information as you need to start a conversation. Asking too many questions right away will discourage people from completing your forms. As a general rule of thumb, the number of fields on your form should relate to the perceived value of what you are providing.

For example a top-of-the-funnel lead who is just researching will be willing to share much less information than a middle-of-the-funnel lead getting ready to engage possible vendors in an RFP. Match your form design to the likely stage of the buying cycle that a lead is at when they become interested in the content you are offering.