Building the ultimate professional services landing page

All good landing pages must have a clear purpose and objective. Typically, their aim is to generate action or to create value for the audience in exchange for their information, such as email addresses or company information.

They are typically where your audience will land first on your site, so making a good and lasting first impression is key to a good experience on your site. The content must have a clear message and be directed toward the correct audiences.

This article will explain the best practices for creating the ultimate professional services landing page, with a template to put your skills into practice.
 

Define your goals

At this stage, you need to define what your goal is with this landing page. 

• Are you trying to collect leads?
• Are you trying to promote yourself or your organisation? 
• Are you trying to promote your services?

Having a clear, measurable goal will allow you to frame your content effectively and help you meet that goal. This will lead to a coherent, solid landing page. 

What do you want your audience to do when they visit your landing page?

Once the reader has read your landing page, what action do you want them to take next? It is important to have a well-thought-out call to action; otherwise, your hard work crafting the perfect landing page might go to waste. The CTA should be relevant to the content and direct the reader to a suitable place.

A few examples of landing page calls to action are:

Subscribe to our newsletter

If you have a newsletter, this is a great opportunity to add more email addresses to your mailing list. A ‘Subscribe to our newsletter’ CTA should capture their email address and first name at a minimum and can be presented within your content or as a popup.

Use our calculator

Offering a calculator on your landing page is a great way to add value and encourage users to share their information. Whether it’s helping them calculate savings, estimate ROI, or assess project costs, a calculator allows the reader to see a quick, tailored result that directly relates to their needs. This creates a win-win situation: the user receives useful insights, while you gain valuable contact details to follow up with later. Including a simple form with fields like email address and business name is an easy way to capture this information and keep the conversation going.

Benchmark yourself

A benchmarking tool on your landing page can give visitors the chance to see how they stack up against industry standards or peers, creating a more personalised and engaging experience. By using a benchmarking tool, you’re able to provide real value to the user, while collecting richer, more insightful data for your own records. These tools not only give your readers a reason to spend more time on your site but also allow you to collect rich proprietary data that you can use to build credibility and positioning your brand as a thought leader in the field.

Download

If the goal of your landing page is to ask your reader to download something, such as a PDF, you can also use this opportunity to capture email addresses to unlock the download. This is another opportunity to capture email addresses you can use to market to them. 

Register for an event

Landing pages are a great way to market events. They allow you to fully explain what you are doing and why the reader should attend. When asking people to register for an event, some more information is needed from them, such as their first and surname, email address, location (if your event has multiple venues), and more. This can change based on the type of event, but typically, more information will need to be gathered at this stage. 

The most optimal way to gather event registers is to create a signup form and position it at the bottom of your content. This requires the reader to read the content before signing up so they know the event is right for them and solves their problem. 

Contact you for more information

Sometimes, email address collection isn’t suitable, and you need a more personal level of contact with the reader. Using a profile block at the end of your landing page with the relevant contact and their details allows the reader to know who exactly they need to talk to. The contact doesn’t necessarily need to be the author of the content but just the person who is the most relevant to the topic or area of expertise. 

The author block should contain their name, email address and phone number at least. It is also nice to have an image of that person, too, as it makes the experience feel more personal for the reader. Besides, they want to put a name to a face if they are working with you!

Stick to one call to action where possible.

To maximise potential returns, it is optimal to include just one CTA. The CTA can be repeated throughout the page, but we should avoid having CTAs with differing messaging. Not only does this make it much easier to create an effective landing page, but it reduces the amount of work the reader has to do when they visit your page. As long as you have a method of collecting their information, that is all you need. 

Measuring the effectiveness of your landing page

After creating the perfect landing page, you must check back and measure whether the page has reached its goal. Was your goal to motivate downloads of a document? Was it to collect X number of enquiries? Each page has different goals, and it is essential to track the performance of your landing page against them to see if your content has bridged the gap you wanted it to.

It is important to define your goals upfront before writing your content, as you can cater what you include to that specific goal. For example, if your goal is to increase PDF downloads, you must capture as many email addresses as possible. So, it is worth mentioning the PDF download throughout your content to cement in the reader's mind that they need to sign up or download the PDF. In this example, there may not be value in mentioning an event you are hosting if you do not include a way for the reader to sign up for the event on the page. It is important to keep your flow consistent and use relevant content that will help you reach your goal. 

Drafting the content for your landing page

Before you start doing anything in the CMS or thinking about design, we recommend getting your content pinned down first. Having a nearly final draft of nearly final content for your landing page makes laying out the page much easier, as you know what you want to say and where. Of course, minor copy changes later on in the process will not be an issue, but large switches in the narrative may completely change the way you structure your landing page.  

It is also a good idea to start thinking about videos and imagery  at this stage too, and how it could be used to support the narrative of your content narrative. 

Content structure

We always come back to our tried and tested structure for landing page content: 

1. Why - is it important: Why is your service, product, event or tool important for your target audience? What value will it create for them that they’d otherwise miss out on? The aim here is to state your value proposition in a way that’s as clear and compelling as possible for your target audience.
    
2. What - do I need to know: Next, explain more about your service, product, event or tool. How does it create the value that you highlighted in step one? What does the process look like? Are there features that differentiate it from other similar offers in the market? Your aim here is to provide a more detailed breakdown of how your value proposition reduces known audience pains and helps them maximise gain. 
    
3. How -  can you help me: Now, you need to give the offer credibility/social proof. How can the audience trust that you are the right people to deliver this value? You can do this in a number of ways, using data, case studies, testimonials, and quotes from existing clients. The aim is to prove that your offer works and that you have the experience needed to deliver it. 
    
4. So, what - should I do next: Finally, it’s time for action. In this section, your aim is to transform the interest of your audience into action, a form fill, an enquiry or an event booking. Clear, concise and compelling calls to action are key. Your aim is to remove as much friction as possible so that the audience can take the next step. Does that form need nine fields? Could you instead ask for a name and an email and then follow up for more information? 

One of the benefits of this framework is that it ensures an appropriate message for the varying target audience members. For example, if you’re a senior stakeholder reading the landing page, you will likely be most interested in the ‘Why’ and ‘So What’ messaging. However, if someone else in the team responsible for implementation reads the page, they’ll likely pay more attention to the ‘What’ and ‘How’ sections. 
 

Building your landing page in the CMS

Now you have all the ingredients, it's time to put everything together to create the ultimate professional services landing page! To see a working example, check out our one here.

Structure and layout

1. Use a compelling title. The title of your page needs to be clear, concise, attention-grabbing, and it needs to outline the page effectively. It will be the first thing a reader sees and will determine whether they decide to click on your landing page or not.
    
2. Headline: The page needs a headline that provides more detail about the page and its content. This headline should be longer than the title but not as long as your lead paragraph. 
    
3. Lead paragraph: A piece of introductory text that explains the narrative of the page. This should be bolder or in a larger font than the body content but not bigger than the title. 
    
4. Body text: This is the main narrative of your page. You should keep text to the point to avoid long scrolls and use subheadings and paragraphs throughout to make your content as digestible as possible. 
    
5. Call To Action: Include a clear call to action at the end in order to sign post and direct readers to the correct place. It is valuable to mention your CTA throughout your content as this will serve as a constant reminder to the reader that they can use your organisation to help them solve their issue. 

Design and visual assets 

Design and visuals can make or break your page. It is all well and good to have beautifully crafted content, but nobody will read it if the page is not engaging. So, laying out your page deliberately and engagingly can improve performance considerably.

1. Visuals: Visuals can be a great way to complement your body content and bring your page to life. They can be videos, images, diagrams, charts, Lottie animations, and more. It is important to use visuals that support your message and narrative and to always keep in mind how these visuals will render when the landing page is viewed on different screens and devices. 
    
2. Layouts: If you are pulling out certain parts of your body content, such as testimonials, you can use plugins such as blockquotes to make these stand out to the reader. It is important to make the most important part of your content stand out the most. You can also use box outs of different background colours to emphasise certain parts of the content. 
   
   Also, it is important to use paragraphs, subheadings, and titles. This creates what feels like a smaller scroll compared to a huge piece of text.
    
3. Animation and Dynamic content: Using showcase effects can really bring your landing page together and give it that cutting-edge edge that will make it stand out. 

At Compound Partners, we use the Django CMS showcase functionality, which is second to none. It allows you to do so much more with your content than just a regular static page. You may notice the colour-changing background on this article, which was created using the showcase functionality. 

Animation is also a fantastic way to elevate your landing page to the next level. On the Django CMS platform, Lottie files can be smoothly integrated into your page, giving it a sense of movement. Check out our home page, where we have a Lottie file in the banner. 

Optimise for SEO

Well done—you have crafted the perfect article! Now, it is time to ensure that it gets seen and ranks well on Google. 

1. A relevant and engaging title: The title of your page must be relevant to your content. Otherwise, your content will fail to return any value to you, as the audience will not click on it. 
    
2. Meta description (What to think about): A meta description is a piece of text used by search engines to give the reader a preview of your page contents before they click the page. A meta description should be between 120-158 characters. Having a meta description that is too long or short will affect your search ranking in Google. Having a strong meta description will lead people in from search, too.
    
3. Title structure & keyword frequency: Including keywords related to your topic will help increase search rankings and clicks. For example, if you are a law firm creating a landing page about Divorce law, it is important to include keywords throughout, as you will be more likely to appear in search rankings. 
    
4. Image alt tags: Image alt tags work the same way as keywords. If you have uploaded an image to your Divorce law page and want to include an image of a courtroom, you should label this image appropriately with alt tags. It is another way of helping search engines rank the relevancy of your content to what a user has searched for. It is also vital from an accessibility point of view, as those who use screen readers rely on image alt tags for image descriptions. 
    
5. Page speed (image and asset optimisation): Having a slow page load speed can lead to your page not being crawled as often by search engines, resulting in your content being crawled less regularly. It also affects the user experience, as people may bounce immediately if your page takes too long to load. 
   
   One way to increase page speed is to make sure your images are not too large- they need to be fully optimised for the web. It is also worth making sure they are not too small, as this can lead to low-resolution images which appear pixelated. Django CMS does this automatically, but Adobe have a detailed guide on how to optimise your images for the web here.

Make sure it’s accessible. 

Being accessible is industry standard for more organisations now, so your webpage should be no less. Having an accessible website allows for everybody to be able to use your website entirely, and to have a good experience on your site. Some users use tools to help them navigate webpages, such as screen readers, which allow visually impaired people to read text using speech. So, it is vital that these individuals have the same experience on your site as anybody else would. Plus, you will rank better in SEO if your page is more accessible. 

1. Alt tags: As mentioned above, alt tags are vital for accessibility as those who use a screen reader rely on them for descriptions. By including alt tags, you are making your web page accessible to that audience. At Compound Partners, we offer a service where we will go through your site and populate alt tags into images that do not have them, saving you tons of time and effort of retrospectively adding alt tags to images. 
    
2. Contrast ratios: Contrast ratios are the way colours contrast on your page. For example, a black background with white text is very clear and easy to read. However, other combinations aren't so easy to read, such as red on an orange background. This would make it difficult to read and, therefore, inaccessible. So, it is important that colours do not clash on your page and that everything is easily and clearly readable.
    
3. Anchor text: Anchor text allows users to easily jump through the page to sections that are of interest to them. It improves the experience of those using screen readers as they can easily navigate to sections that are relevant to them. It also clearly directs users to a signposted section, which improves user experience

Test on and optimise for mobile.

Testing on mobile and tablets is a useful exercise, especially if you know you get a lot of mobile traffic. The way a page is laid out or looks on desktop doesn’t necessarily mean it will seamlessly translate into a good mobile page. 

1. Why test on mobile?: Testing on mobile allows you to see exactly what a mobile user would see when viewing your page. You can use this information to make changes to your layout to make it accessible for mobile users. 
    
2. How to test on mobile?: You can also use tools, such as BrowserStack, to emulate how your page will look on any screen size or browser so you can make the relevant changes. You can also test it on your desktop. If you right-click on the page and press ‘inspect, ' you can shrink the screen size to smaller devices to test your page. Also, you can look at the page on a phone and tablet and note down any changes you need to make. 
    
3. Do all elements visible on desktop need to be visible on mobile?: Not everything will work on mobile and desktop all the time. However, on Django CMS, you can hide certain elements on mobile or desktop. This gives you more control over how your elements look on each screen size. However, this can cause problems down the line if you need to update this content, as you will need to update it in two places.