How To Design And Optimize School Website Landing Pages

5268

SEO

10 Apr, 2024

how-to-design-and-optimize-school-website-landing-pages

Designing and optimizing a school website landing page design is challenging because you have many things to consider. These are not only limited by the content on your page but also by major internal factors such as layout, colour scheme, font size, image optimization, etc. 

You need to design your landing page in a way that removes any friction for your target audience from their path toward conversion. You can save much of your time and stress by giving this task to one of the most reliable and best web optimization companies.

However, here are the important best practices and tips for a convertible school website landing page to know. 

Interested in our Web Design & Development Services?
  • Achieve Your Brand Vision
  • Drive Customer Engagement
  • Customize UI for Intuitive Digital Interactions

How Does A Landing Page Help Your Education Site?

You can easily add a contact form on your About Page or Homepage, then what's the point of creating a landing page? Unlike your About Page or Homepage, an education landing page is capable of getting the undivided attention of visitors. It does not include competing links, navigation, or alternate options. Once you get the complete attention of visitors, you can guide them to wherever you want. Thus, convincing them to fill lead form becomes much easier. Landing pages are designed particularly to drive conversions. 

After understanding the landing page's importance, let's cover some best practices to optimize the page.

What Is An Education Landing Page?

Your education landing pages have the sole purpose of converting students into leads Two aspects of your education website landing page make it different from the rest of the web pages of your site. These are as follows: 

  • It consists of a form that enables you to capture essential student data in exchange for a preferred offer. This type of form often falls in the category of RFI or Request For Information forms. 
  • It is not packed with several distractions such as internal/external links, navigation, etc. The aim is to drive students to take the desired action. However, it differs from your website's Home Page with a form. Home pages serve different purposes. Thus, they are not considered landing pages.

The landing page design for the education site allows it to be a standalone page, especially for digital marketing campaigns. You can make the landing pages the marketing-critical pages for your website. For example, academic program pages. 

You can use them to improve SEO, increase organic traffic, and build your brand by using the pages strategically or by hiring a landing page design company. The following elements can help draw strategies around creating an education website landing page: 

  • Types of students you prefer to engage with.
  • Understanding of who might be interested in your university or college. 
  • Knowing what motivates students to take action.

One of the best ways to ensure a convertible landing page is to take insights and help from a landing page designing company. 

It was an overview of the education landing pages, but why are landing pages so important for your education site? Let's learn.

Education Landing Page Design Best Practices

1. Use value-centric headlines

Use value-centric headlines

Students must know what's in it for them as they read the headline of the landing page. By clicking on the heading, ensure to be upfront and straightforward about what visitors will get. Here is an example of a perfect value-driven headline: Top-ranked courses and educational programs for a secure future.

2. Use an image that highlights the offer

Once you create an appropriate headline for the school landing page, ensure to use a complementing image along with it. The image should convey a feeling that speaks to your target audience. It must exemplify the feeling of your visitors once they receive your offering. To understand which illustrations appeal to your audience, guide to A/B testing will be needed. 

3. Write compelling page copy

Write a landing page copy that entices your visitors to stay engaged with your messaging and follow the CTA (Call to Action). A great web copy is expressive, personal, and persuasive. Web optimization companies should ensure to add these elements while creating the content. Use the following tactics: 

  • Keep your writing tone and style that resonates with your target audience. 
  • Answer the key concerns and questions they may have. 
  • Use appropriate messaging to get them on board. 

4. Make the lead form accessible

Reading your compelling landing page copy, your prospects might want to convert immediately. Thus, giving them quick access to the lead form will be convenient for you and your prospects. It is recommended that web optimization companies should place the form above the fold so that visitors won't need to scroll through the entire landing page. Other effective ways to increase the visibility of the lead form on the landing page are: 

  • Place an anchor link redirecting to the form above the fold.
  • Design a dynamic form that moves along the page as the visitor scrolls down.

5. Add powerful call-to-action

You might wonder what makes an effective CTA needed for landing page conversion optimization and how to make it stand out from regular CTAs. Little changes in the CTA button design according to these call to action examples and what action verb you use in the button can make a huge difference in click-through rates. Here are the most significant elements that make a powerful landing page CTA that encourages conversion: 

  • The CTA button should be easily visible in chosen font size, colour, and placement. 
  • Use white spaces to avoid texts getting converged into one another.
  • CTA colour should stand out from the rest of the text on the page. Use bold and bright colours such as Blue, Purple, Orange, Green, Yellow, Red, etc. 
  • Use supporting text before the CTA button to nudge the visitor. You can talk about what in-depth information they can get about your offer.  
  • The button should display a clear action verb. For example, Submit, Download, Contact, etc. 

6. Use Social Proof

There is no need to explain the importance of web design that embeds social proof as one of its components. Online users do care about others' reviews of your services before signing. Embedding social proof on the landing page positively influences your target audience. Here's what your best website optimization company can add as effective social proof for your education: 

  • Students and parents' testimonials 
  • Number of shares on social media
  • Number of graduates, recent year's admissions, etc

7. Create a mobile responsive page

 Mobile Devices Traffic

If your website is non-responsive to the different viewing experiences, especially mobile views, you miss the chance to convert your visitors to leads. Your education website design, including all web pages, must be mobile-optimized. You can use services from a landing page design company to ensure your website and landing page are accessible to different device users. They follow updated mobile responsive best design practices to ensure maximum relevancy of your site with today’s students. 

8. Localize Your Education Landing Page

The localizing landing page is an underrated method to reach new audiences and boost conversion. 

Here are a few ways to use localization during landing page development: 

  • Create offers based on the target visitors' location. 
  • Instead of stock pictures with localized images. 
  • Convert generic web content with region-based content. 
  • Provide a local phone number and address. 
  • Ensure to embed Google Maps to let visitors find your location. 
  • Use 3rd party websites to provide local business reviews. 

However, it is recommended to always test the page's performance after applying localization strategies to increase conversion rate for small business websites. It will be time-consuming for a widespread education business to check each landing page and switch different locations. It is recommended to hire the best website optimization company to do the task for you.

Here are a few metrics that help analyse the results: 

  • Localization methods impact the cost of acquisition. 
  • Changes in expenses when you switched from generic ads' to localized ads. 
  • Effect on marketing ROI.
  • Differences between localized traffic conversion rates with non-localized traffic.

9. Optimize for organic search

You can get the best benefits of effective educational web page design if your site appears in organic searches. Optimize your page with target key phrases for organic search and paid campaigns. Here's how you can make your landing page easily searchable online:

  • Pick target keywords that match your audience's search intent. 
  • Use zero or low-volume keywords, as people searching for these keywords are more likely to act on CTA.
  • Make high-quality content that compels visitors to visit it often or share it with others.
  • Do not use the exact content on your landing page to any other web page of your site to avoid a claim of duplicate content.
  • Keep updating page content with new stories, testimonials, and achievements.
  • Use relevant H1 on the page that reflects the page's content clearly. Use subtopics by placing H2s, H3s, and H4s as needed.  

10. Add a thank you page

Once your leads fill out the form, redirect them to a wholesome Thank You page. Though it is optional, it can enhance the user experience design by serving the following purposes: 

  • It proves the delivery of the offer you promised to lead.
  • It opens the door to sharing additional offer-relevant content with the leads. 
  • It shows your gratitude towards them for showing interest. 

The best website design tips for Thank You page suggest it must consist of the following:

  • A confirmation message: You just signed up for .. (). Thank you for being so interested..(). 
  • Mention of what happens next: You'll receive an email in your inbox shortly for.. ().
  • Opportunities to learn more: In the meantime, here are some additional resources you may want to check out. 

How To Optimize Your Education Landing Page Design?

A website landing page design is often thought to consist of impressive pictures, creativity, and colours. Though they are a significant part of page design, many more things come up while designing a landing page. The design of an education website must be direction-oriented, functional, and effective. 

Here are the website navigation best practices that you must take care of while performing landing page optimization

1. Structure of the landing page

The best thing about creating a landing page is you do not need to brainstorm too much creativity. The basic landing page design has been proven to be effective. However, to make it result-driven, you must include the following elements on the page: 

  • Attention-grabbing headline
  • Audience-pleasing and relevant image
  • Clearly visible lead form
  • Action-oriented CTA
  • Engaging, descriptive, and high-quality copy

2. Page Layout

Visitors usually don't read a page's copy word by word. Instead, they pay attention only to relevant information. Thus, you should identify what your audience might be looking for and make the information stand out on the page. Besides placing important details above the fold, you must use different methods to ensure a functional landing page layout for your site. 

Some of the most accurate methods are: 

Landing page Blink test 

The Blink Test is the time frame in which visitors figure out whether the site is worth their time. The time frame usually lasts from 3 to 5 seconds. You can do the following steps to pass the standards of the blink test: 

  • Keep the landing page design and colors simple. 
  • Use a professionally created logo to boost the credibility of your website. 
  • Ensure your education website is loading quickly on both desktop and mobile devices. 

Use of negative/ white space 

A white or negative space on a landing page refers to the blank space in the page design. It is the space left between paragraphs lines, between paragraphs, layouts, between UIs, etc. These left-out spaces can be of any colour theory, pattern, texture, and background pictures. Here are a few benefits of using whitespaces in page layout:

  • The page appears aesthetically good, boosting UX and UI. 
  • Improves comprehension of the message.
  • Highlights the focus information for visitors.
  • Increases interaction rate by highlighting CTAs. 
  • Guide users via a logical grouping of visual information. 
  • Makes copy easy to digest.

F-pattern

You must present the important copy in an F-pattern. The human eye is trained to start reading from the tab top left corner of a given content block. It continues scanning horizontally, then drops to the next line and keeps repeating until something interesting comes up. 

Providing the F-pattern content will be the most convenient for visitors to go through your page. Put extra effort into how the visual patterns flow on the page. It will drive visitors to the key points that will get them to convert. 

3. Landing Page Colors

To form a long time relationship with the visitors, you need to familiarize them with the evening star and branding colours of your website. Thus, the landing page design must include the colour and pattern that reflects your education website branding services.

However, ensure your CTA button has alternate colours and the other elements on your page. Your landing page colour should be in contrast with the CTA button colour. Thus, the page helps it to stand out. 

4. Page Images

Clearly, using authentic pictures is more effective than stock images. But what kind of images will suit best for your landing page? To find out, you can ask yourself the following questions:

  • Will the image be relevant to my target audience?
  • What important information do I want the visitors to look at? Where can I place the image to make the information more noticeable?
  • Will the chosen image straighten my message?

5. An In-Page Short Form

In-Page Short Form

Create a lead form of 5 fields on the landing page for prospective students. Ensure the CTA button is the only call-to-action provided on the page. The button should reference actions being taken, like Give Back or Sign Up, so prospects know they won't be sent to another page. The fewer CTA options you provide, the higher the chances of conversion. Once the form is submitted, you can redirect them to the Thank You page. A Thank You page can have multiple CTAs to keep them engaged. 

FAQs

1. What are the 4 essential elements of an education landing page?

The 4 most essential elements of an education landing page include: 

  • Engaging heading and copy.
  • Inspirational social proof
  • Compelling benefits
  • Strong CTA

2. What is the best size for an education landing page?

While working on web design for an education website, the size of the landing page matters. It is recommended to use a size of 940 – 960 pixels as it works for most screen sizes. 

3. What should you exclude from a landing page?

Ensure to avoid including the following things on your education landing page: 

  • Unclear Call-to-Action
  • Asking for too much information
  • Visual distractions
  • Too many redirecting links
  • Too much text
  • Not meeting your promises after lead sign ups

Conclusion

Landing pages are a great solution to promote your website to visitors. They also serve as a good starting point for marketing campaigns and lead generation. Remember, your website visitors will feel rushed if you expect them to read a long, wordy sales pitch in the space of their landing page. Keep things simple. Strip out everything that isn't absolutely necessary, as well as anything that distracts from the key information that your customers need.

You can take help from professionals to ease out the entire process of creating a landing page design for your educational site. JanBask Digital Design is one of the best web optimization companies for all your website-related needs. The company has field experts who oversee your website design and maintenance.

Interested in our Landing Page Design Services?

  • Achieve Your Brand Vision
  • Drive Customer Engagement
  • Customize UI for Intuitive Digital Interactions
JanBask

JanBask - Author

A Specialized Team for custom web solutions for your business through Web Design, Web Development, Digital Marketing Services such as SEO, Social Media Marketing.

13
Leave a Reply

13 Comment threads
0 Thread replies
0 Followers
 
Most reacted comment
Hottest comment thread
2 Comment authors
Recent comment authors
  Subscribe  
newest oldest most voted
Notify of

B

Beckham Allen

Your topics are always interesting and educational. We have especially enjoyed the School Website Landing Pages programs. My friend shared me this article. It was well-written and contained sound, practical advice. I look forward to reading your next informative work. Thank you.

C

Cayden Young

The article clearly showed each side of the School Website Landing Pages issue and raised many questions that most voters have not considered. But the way you explain the complex topic that easily is truly amazing. Thank you so much for sharing this.

J

Jaden Hernandez

I have just finished reading the article your team wrote on the topic of the School Website Landing Pages. I want to tell you how much I appreciated your clearly written and thought-provoking article. Your article expresses both the positive and negative aspects of this important topic.

E

Emerson King

I recently had the good fortune of reading your teams article School Website Landing Pages. It was well-written and contained sound, practical advice. Our schools are doing a good job with limited resources, and they appreciate all the help we can give them. Thanks again for such uplifting coverage.

R

Ronan Wright

I want to tell you how much I appreciated your clearly written and thought-provoking article. I have heard so many times that reading is a good habit to have. But, after seeing your team’s article I realized that writing can be a better option, too.

S

Simon Martinez

Very helpful

P

Phoenix Robinson

Content well-explained

E

Eduardo Bennett

This blog post is a must-read for anyone involved in school website design.

D

Dante Ramirez

I love how user-friendly this landing page is! It’s easy to find all the important information about the school in one place. Great job!

H

Hendrix Howard

I’m loving the insights in this blog about school website landing pages. As a parent, it’s essential for me to have an easy-to-navigate and informative landing page to keep up with school events and announcements. Great tips here!

J

Jensen Evans

The blog provides a fantastic beginner’s guide to landing pages, but it’s also a valuable resource for experienced marketers.

J

Jake Morgan

This blog shares insights on optimizing your landing page to convert curious visitors into enthusiastic applicants.


Get a Quote