TL;DR: A landing page has one job: getting a visitor to take one step. Five checks show where a page is losing people: distractions, too many choices, a button nobody sees, a page Google and AI tools can’t find, and a page that doesn’t match what brought the visitor there. Each check below comes with the research behind it.
So, I truly think so many people don’t understand the importance of a clear landing page.
Having a landing page that doesn’t convert means no matter how good your product is, the person, the face facing the public trying to sell your product is trash. And if that’s trash, people assume everything else is trash, and they don’t even get to see what your product is, what your service is, what your free call is. That’s what I want to help you fix.
I actually do a review of my landing pages quarterly just to make sure they fit the funnel, they fit the messaging. And I’ve been doing a lot more of this with my clients as part of my AI and marketing strategy work.
I ran it on my Substack, on my call page that comes from Substack for my consulting practice. And it included a workshop, it included different packages, and now it’s just moved to call. There were just too many buttons, too many distractions, the top menu, etc. It also flagged that a number was outdated, and I was still mentioning a product that I no longer run.
Below are the five checks I run on every landing page, what each one looks for, and the research behind it.
Paid subscribers also get the skill itself: paste in any page link, and Claude runs all five checks and hands back a report showing where visitors get lost and what to fix first, which will give you this for each page:
What You’ll Walk Away With
The five questions that tell you in minutes whether a page is helping or hurting what you sell
The research behind each one, so you can make the case to a designer, a team, or yourself
A way to catch the stale number or the retired offer before a visitor does
Quick Win (under 60 seconds) Open your most important page on your phone. Before you scroll, count everything a visitor could tap. If more than one of those taps leads somewhere other than the step you want, you’ve found your first fix.
The face of your business
Every visitor meets your landing page before they meet your product, your service, or you. For a sense of the stakes, Unbounce’s 2024 Conversion Benchmark Report looked at more than 41,000 landing pages and found the median page gets 6.6% of its visitors to take the step. Most people who land on a page leave, even on an average one, so every avoidable reason to leave costs you.
The five checks
1. No distractions
For example, no distractions, no confusing menu that takes you away from the CTA.
A CTA, or call to action, is the one button or link you want visitors to click. Everything else on the page competes with it. When HubSpot removed the top menu, footer links and social share links from some of its own landing pages, the pages asking for a bigger commitment saw 16% and 28% more sign-ups, while simpler pages moved 0-4%. The bigger the ask, the more a distraction costs you.
2. One clear next step
Define the CTA. Some of the pages that I’ve reviewed with clients have 20-plus CTAs on a landing page. How can a customer be expected to know what to click on and what to ignore and what’s noise?
Unbounce says it plainly in the same benchmark report: “multiple conversion types on a landing page is typically not best practice.” One step can still have several buttons, as long as every one of them leads to the same place.
Where should you actually start with AI?
We all got the tools at the same time, the way everyone eventually got electricity. Having it in the building was never what made the difference. What we did with it was.
I take three diagnostic calls a month. It’s 30 minutes, free, and we work out what you’re actually trying to get to, where your biggest hurdles sit, what your low-hanging fruit is, and how that lines up with what I’ve been seeing elsewhere. Then I tell you the first move I’d make.
Afterward I send you an outline of how I’d work on your biggest pain points, so you can decide on your own time.
3. Easy to spot
Or sometimes the CTA is in the bottom third of the page.
People do scroll, but they give most of their attention to the top. In a Nielsen Norman Group eye-tracking study of 120 people, 57% of viewing time went to what shows before scrolling, and attention dropped sharply after that. If the one step you want sits near the bottom, most of your visitors’ attention is spent before they reach it.
4. Easy to find
What about SEO considerations? What about AEO considerations? These are crucial things.
SEO (search engine optimization) is whether Google can find and show your page. AEO is the same question for AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI answers. The good news is that you don’t need a second set of tricks for AI: Google says there are “no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary” beyond being a clear page Google can already find. What helps is being specific. A 2024 study presented at KDD found that adding sources, quotations and statistics could raise a page’s visibility in AI-generated answers by up to 40%, in tests on a simulated AI engine.
5. Matches what they expected
This is the check that my quarterly review exists for, making sure every page still fits the funnel and still fits the messaging. A funnel is the path from someone first hearing about you to becoming a customer, and your landing page is one step on it. Google treats this as part of an ad’s quality: its landing page experience rating asks how relevant and useful the page is to the people who clicked.
Who this is for
To the pushback that, hey, I have a designer that does this, I have a whole marketing team that reviews my landing pages. Great. It’s probably not something that you need.
For everyone else, I just want to provide the exact skill that I use. I want to provide a skill that brings all my expertise into one place so that anybody can run it, either for your own page or for any page in your company, to review the landing page.
If skills are new to you, How to Use Claude: The 4 Levels Most Leaders Never Climb shows where they fit, and Claude Skills for Marketing shows the others I run across my content and email. This one joins the Claude Skill Library as the one I reach for before anything goes live.
Two things it can’t do. It reads the page, not your analytics, so it can’t tell you how many people actually take the step. And it can’t tell you whether the offer or the price is right, because a perfect page can’t save an offer nobody wants.
So those are the five checks. Below this line is the skill that runs all five on any page you paste in, how to install it in a couple of minutes, and a sample of the report it builds.
💎 Your Landing Page Checkup skill
Below is the Landing Page Checkup, the Claude skill that runs all five checks on any page and hands back a clickable report. It comes with everything else your membership includes:
The Claude Skill Library. Twenty-five paste-ready Claude Skills, sorted by the six jobs a leader actually has. You copy one block, answer a few questions, and it builds itself around your role and your business. No downloads, no setup, and you can’t buy these anywhere at any price.
Every artifact I’ve gated. The skills, templates and walkthroughs from every past Monday, yours the moment you join.
Premium is $49 for the year.
