Optimizing your landing page: Mistakes to avoid to maximize your conversions

Companies often spend more time on campaign targeting, media budgets and ad copy than on the page people see after they click. The ads may be well targeted and the traffic may be relevant, but the landing page still opens with vague brand language, asks for too much information and gives the visitor no clear reason to continue.

A landing page has a simple job. It should explain the offer, show why it is relevant, provide enough information to support the next decision and make that next step easy to understand.

Many pages fail because they make people search for basic information. The headline does not say what the company offers. The copy starts with the company rather than the problem. The call to action is vague. The form asks for information that is not needed yet. In Swiss B2B marketing, language, privacy and trust can add another layer of friction.

Start with the problem the campaign promised to solve

A landing page should begin with the reason someone clicked.

Imagine a Zurich wealthtech company promoting software that consolidates portfolios held across several custodian banks. The ad talks about reducing manual work in multi-bank reporting. The landing page then opens with “Transforming wealth management through innovative digital solutions”.

That headline says almost nothing about the product. A more useful version would be:

Consolidate portfolios held across several custodian banks in one reporting view.

The visitor now knows what the product does and can decide whether to keep reading.

The same applies to professional services. Someone searching for help with a company sale wants to know whether the adviser works on transactions like theirs. A CFO looking for support with sustainability reporting wants to know what the consultancy will do, how the process works and what the internal team will still need to handle.

Companies often weaken landing-page copy during internal approval. Marketing wants a clear product message, management wants the brand proposition included and another team wants several services mentioned. The final headline may satisfy everyone internally while telling the prospective client very little.

The landing page should match the campaign

If an ad promotes one thing, the landing page should stay on that subject.

Suppose an investment firm runs a LinkedIn campaign for a report called How Swiss Family Offices Are Approaching Private Markets in 2026. Someone clicks and lands on a page headed Investment Solutions for the Future, followed by a general description of the firm’s services.

The reader now has to search for the report. That problem appears frequently when companies use one general service page for several campaigns. It is convenient internally, but people arrive with different levels of knowledge and different reasons for clicking.

Someone who searches Google for “portfolio consolidation software Switzerland” may already be comparing providers. A person who sees a LinkedIn article about reporting inefficiencies may still be learning about the problem. The first person can be sent to a direct product page. The second may need more explanation before being asked to book a demo.

Traffic source therefore needs to be considered when the page is written. Email traffic, paid search and paid social often convert at very different rates because the level of interest is different before the visitor reaches the page. The landing page should reflect that starting point.

Do not shorten the page just because conversion advice says shorter is better

Short copy is useful when the decision is simple. It is less useful when the offer is complex or expensive.

Someone buying a CHF 40 subscription may only need a few product details and a price. A bank considering a technology implementation or a company selecting an adviser for a six-figure mandate expects more information before agreeing to a meeting.

A complex B2B page may need to explain how the service works, who normally uses it, what the client receives, who delivers the work, how implementation is handled and what experience the provider has.

The issue is not length. The issue is whether the information helps the buyer make a decision.

Company history, broad statements about innovation, long sections about values and descriptions of unrelated services usually do not help. Neither does technical language added simply to make the company sound sophisticated.

Current conversion research also shows that simpler language tends to perform better on SaaS landing pages. That does not mean specialist companies should remove technical terminology altogether. It means they should use it where it is necessary and explain the offer in normal business language everywhere else. A technically complex product can still be described clearly.

Replace vague calls to action with real actions

“Contact us” tells the company what the visitor should do, but it does not explain what happens next.

A prospective client may want to know whether the first step is a sales call, a product demo, a technical discussion or simply an email response.

Calls to action such as Book a 20-minute introductory call, Request a sample report or See the platform in a product walkthrough are clearer because they describe the next step.

The level of commitment should also match the type of visitor.

Someone downloading a report about Swiss cybersecurity regulation may only be researching the subject. Asking that person to “Talk to sales” immediately may be too early. Someone who searched for a specific cybersecurity provider and visited a service page is much closer to a commercial conversation.

Companies should therefore decide what they actually want someone to do at each stage rather than using the same CTA across every campaign.

A higher conversion rate is not always a better result

Conversion rate is easy to track, which is why it often becomes the main measure of landing-page performance.

If 1,000 people visit a page and 50 complete the form, the conversion rate is 5%. If a revised page produces 70 submissions, the page appears to have improved.

The sales data may tell a different story.

Perhaps only ten of the 70 enquiries fit the target client profile. Perhaps the revised page attracts more students, suppliers or very small businesses that the company does not serve. More people may book meetings, while fewer of those meetings lead to proposals.

For B2B and professional-services companies, form submissions should be tracked through the sales process. Qualified leads, meetings held, proposals issued and revenue give a much better view of whether the page is working.

Industry benchmarks can still be useful for context, but they should not be treated as targets. A Swiss consultancy converting at 2% may have an excellent page if those leads regularly turn into substantial mandates. Another company may convert at 10% and still generate mostly poor-quality enquiries. The quality of the lead matters more than the percentage on the dashboard.

Forms should ask only for information needed at that stage

Sales and marketing teams usually want to know as much as possible about a prospect. Job title, company size, telephone number, country, budget, project timing and purchasing authority may all be useful eventually.

They are not always needed before a person downloads a report or books an introductory call. The number of fields should match the request. Someone asking for a proposal can reasonably be asked for more detail. Someone registering for an event probably cannot.

Swiss data-protection rules also require companies to be clear about what personal data they collect and how they use it.

Under the Federal Act on Data Protection, organisations must inform people about the processing of personal data, including who is responsible for it and why the data are being collected. The Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner also recommends clear information about what data are collected and whether they are shared with third parties.

Marketing teams should therefore review every required field. If the company does not need a phone number to send a report or arrange a first call, there is no reason to make it mandatory.

Swiss campaigns need a clear language strategy

Switzerland cannot be treated as one language market. German is the main language for most of the population, while French and Italian are important regional languages and many people use more than one language regularly. English is also common in international business, particularly in finance, technology and pharmaceuticals.

The language choice should follow the audience and the type of decision. A Zurich fintech buyer may work with suppliers almost entirely in English. A French-speaking business owner in Vaud may read English fluently but still prefer to assess a local adviser in French. A pharmaceutical company in Basel may use English internally even when the wider local market does not.

Companies should therefore decide which language the buyer normally uses when evaluating that type of supplier. Translation also needs to be reviewed properly. Search terms differ between language regions. A CTA that sounds natural in German may sound too aggressive in French. Client examples from one part of Switzerland may also be less persuasive in another market.

National campaigns should be analysed by language and region. A strong German-language page can hide weak results from the French version if the company only looks at the national average.

The Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner also recommends that privacy information should be available in the same languages as the website.

Trust should be shown with facts

Words such as “trusted”, “independent”, “bespoke” and “leading” appear on many Swiss financial and professional-services websites.

They are claims. They are not proof. A landing page should show what supports those claims. That may include the people who deliver the service, the company’s Swiss legal entity, the types of clients it serves, relevant registrations, recognised certifications or a concrete client example.

A Geneva adviser working with Swiss entrepreneurs may gain more from showing the senior people who handle mandates than from another paragraph about personalised service.

A technology company should show the product if the interface is important to the buying decision. A consultancy can explain an anonymised assignment, what the client needed and what the team actually did.

For example, a wealthtech provider could describe a small wealth manager that receives portfolio data from four custodian banks and still reconciles part of it manually before producing month-end reports. The page can then explain exactly which parts of that process the software automates.

That tells the reader more than saying the platform “transforms wealth management”. Precise language is also useful in financial services because broad promotional claims can create unnecessary compliance problems.

Design should make the information easier to read

A landing page does not need a redesign simply because it looks old. It needs a redesign when the current layout makes the offer difficult to understand.

The most important information should appear in the order the reader needs it. If the product is software, screenshots may help people understand it quickly. If the service depends on senior expertise and personal relationships, photographs and short profiles of the people doing the work may be useful. Generic office imagery usually adds very little.

Mobile needs separate attention because the same copy behaves differently on a smaller screen. A headline that looks short on a laptop may fill most of a phone screen. Six form fields can feel much longer on mobile. Cookie notices, chat widgets and sticky buttons can cover a large part of the page.

Companies should therefore review mobile pages as actual pages, not simply check whether the responsive design technically works.

Review the landing page before increasing the media budget

Suppose a Swiss B2B software company spends CHF 12,000 on LinkedIn and generates 1,500 relevant visits. Fifteen people request a demo.

The first reaction may be to increase the media budget or change the targeting. The company should also review what those 1,500 people saw after they clicked. Perhaps the ad promoted automated client reporting, while the page opened with generic digital-transformation language. Perhaps the product screenshot appeared too far down the page. Perhaps the form asked for ten fields before someone could speak to the company.

If a revised page produces 25 qualified demo requests from a similar amount of traffic, the campaign has become more efficient without any increase in media spend.

The figures are hypothetical, but the principle is practical. Marketing teams should evaluate acquisition and landing-page performance together because both affect the cost of generating a qualified lead.

Test specific problems

A/B testing is useful when the company knows what it wants to learn.

If many people start the form and then leave, test the form. If most visitors leave almost immediately, review the headline, offer and traffic source. If the French page performs much worse than the German version, review the French copy, targeting and offer before testing cosmetic changes.

Sales teams can also identify gaps that analytics will not explain. If prospects repeatedly ask the same question before agreeing to a meeting, the landing page probably needs to answer it.

Small B2B companies also need to be realistic about traffic volume. A specialist Swiss business with a few hundred landing-page visits a month cannot run dozens of statistically meaningful experiments. Interviews with prospects, sales feedback and session recordings may provide more useful information than splitting limited traffic between several headline variants.

Build the page around the actual buying decision

A Geneva wealth manager, a Zurich SaaS company and an industrial SME in St. Gallen do not need the same landing page.

The page should be built around the audience, the traffic source, the value of the offer and the next decision the buyer needs to make.

That determines how much information to include, which proof points to show, whether the page needs another language version and whether the next step should be a sales meeting, a demo, a report download or something else.

Companies usually improve landing-page performance more by fixing those decisions than by changing button colours or adding more traffic to a page that is unclear in the first place.