Landing Page Optimization: How clarity gets more visitors to take an action

Action Box: The New Economics (and Philosophy) of Value in the AI Era 

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STEP #1: Focus 

The goal of a landing page is a conversion. 

But have you ever stopped to think what a conversion actually is? As marketers, sometimes we just think it’s a metric we need to hit this quarter. 

A conversion is the act or process of changing something or someone from one form, use, or state into another. 

The ultimate conversion for a marketer is changing someone from non-customer to customer. But for many products there are many smaller conversions that need to happen along the way. Here are some common calls to action, along with the before-and-after state of the human acting on the CTA: 

• Request a demo – From curious to actively learning 
• Download the guide – From searching to equipped to act 
• Get a pricing quote – From uncertain to decision-ready 
• Start a free trial – From doubting to learning by doing 

So ask yourself and your team a few key questions about the people you are trying to reach with your landing page: 

• Who are they? 
• Where are they in the customer journey? 
• What is the next action that would help these specific people at this specific place in the customer journey? 

This is how a landing page for a company with more than one product and/or prospect is different from the homepage (for a one-product, one-prospect company the homepage is the de facto landing page until they grow). 

Bringing this clarity to your landing page (before you ever build the page) will help you get a more focused output from your team or AI tool. 

Quick Example: Focused landing page for MECLABS AI feature 

Here’s an example from our own backyard – MECLABS AI is the parent company of MarketingSherpa. 

MECLABS AI can do many things for many people. And you can find all of that on the homepage. 

But in addition to the homepage, our team also created focused, targeted landing pages for specific features of MECLABS AI. Here’s a landing page built for marketers and entrepreneurs at professional services firms to build a custom AI agent. 

Creative Sample #1: Focused landing page 

This landing page focuses on professional services teams/consultants who want more qualified leads without operational burden. Notice the headline is ‘Grow your client base with an intelligent intake agent.’ By focusing on only this group of people and only this feature of MECLABS AI, the headline reduces mental work by using the language commonly used by prospects in this industry. 

With the ‘send my agent’ CTA, it takes them from browsing or considering options, to trying the specific product feature. 

STEP #2: Prioritize 

Prioritization is choosing where you can create the strongest value proposition with the lowest friction/anxiety for a motivated segment. 

Again, this is easier for small companies. If you have one ideal customer set with one feature and one offer, your homepage is essentially your landing page. 

But for a mid-market or bigger company, you have the opportunity – and corollary challenge – of deciding where to focus. There are many ideal customer sets you can serve with many features that can be presented through many offers.  You multiply all of those three numbers together and it can be a lot. 

Here are some factors that can help your team prioritize: 

• Motivation Strength: Does this ideal customer set already want this right now, or would we have to educate them first? 
• Competition in the Marketplace: How many similar options does the ideal customer have for this? 
• Value Clarity: Is the feature/offer combination simple enough that we can explain the promise in one sentence a customer would immediately understand? 
• Proof Available: Can we show credible evidence on the page (results, examples, method, third-party validation, real customer proof)? 
• Friction to Start: How hard is the next step for the customer (time, effort, form length, meeting, setup)? 
• Anxiety Risk: How worried will the ideal customer be about spam, aggressive sales follow-up, hidden costs, complexity, switching, or risk? Can we clearly minimize these anxieties, or are they inherent in our feature/offer combination? 
• Speed to Revenue: If this works, how quickly can it turn into real sales? 

These questions hopefully help you prioritize which landing pages to launch. But they shouldn’t be the only thing your marketing is focused on. 

For example, you may have an ideal customer set that needs to be educated first and won’t quickly turn into revenue. However, if they would be high-margin customers your company can truly serve and they have a high lifetime value, these prospects are certainly worth part of your marketing effort. 

You just have to decide how to allocate those efforts. If you’re a bootstrapped, cash-flow-challenged company you will have to spend more of your marketing dollars and time prioritizing quicker-hit landing pages. 

But if you work at a well-funded brand or a mature company with a healthy cash flow, you can allocate more of your marketing to long-term, sustainable approaches and just throw in a few quick-hit landing pages to help smooth out the results each quarter. 

STEP #3: State a single, clear value proposition in plain language 

If your value proposition is vague, your visitors have to do extra work. Unless they are highly motivated, that friction is enough for them to bounce from your page. 

To make this idea concrete for you, here are examples of common vague promises and how to make them clearer: 

• NOT THIS: ‘Solutions for digital transformation’ 
• BUT THIS: ‘Modernize your back-office processes in 90 days – without replacing your core systems.’ 
   
• NOT THIS: ‘The future of customer experience’ 
• BUT THIS: ‘Cut customer wait time in half by routing every request to the right agent automatically.’ 
   
• NOT THIS: ‘A platform that empowers teams’ 
• BUT THIS: ‘Give your team one place to track every project, deadline, and owner – so nothing slips.’ 
   
• NOT THIS: ‘Stay informed with the latest news.’ 
• BUT THIS: ‘Get a 5-minute morning briefing on the stories that affect your industry, plus links to go deeper.’ 

To sharpen your own value proposition, use questions like these: 

• Who is it for? – you can place this in the eyebrow (a small headline above the H1), but also make sure to use terms that speak in their language throughout the page 
• What does it help them do? – don’t begin with why your company is so great, first tell your ideal customer how you serve them 
• Why is it better? How is it different? – be as specific as possible 
• What do they get? – the specific deliverable that helps them do what you said they could do (it may take the full product purchase to get all of that value, but what you’re giving them in the offer should at least provide a small taste of that value) 

Summarize all of this into a clear, simple line included in the brief for your team or an AI prompt – ‘For [audience], [offer] helps you [primary benefit] by [how it works / key differentiator].’ 

If you can’t write that sentence, you have a clarity problem with your value proposition and your offer. 

Now, let’s look at a real-world example. 

Quick Case Study #2: Event clarifies what it is and who it’s for, conversion improves 57% 

BEFORE 

The look, feel, and structure of the homepage for a 10-year-old event hadn’t been updated in years. The team would just change the content to reflect each event’s theme. 

Its most recent headline, which came under the date and location of the event, was ‘Seek Clarity, Build Brillance [sic].’ 

Creative Sample #2: Old version of hero 

Lower down on the page, there was info about the event’s value proposition, with a focus on exclusivity. 

Creative Sample #3: Old site’s fifth section 

The site had a section to say who the event was for but mostly focused on positives and did not serve as much of a self-selection criteria. 

Creative Sample #3: Old site’s ninth section 

 

AFTER 

On April 17, 2026, the team launched a rebuilt version. They made several changes, but the most prominent was reducing confusion. 

“It was about clarifying and cleaning up verbiage to practice what we preach even on the website. We needed this website to be as ADHD friendly as our events are. That meant shorter sections, clearer headers, better photography, better use of our branding, and curiosity hooks that pull you forward instead of walls of text that make you check out,” said Stephanie Scheller, founder, Grow Disrupt. 

The new headline read ‘The business growth conference built for the ADHD entrepreneur.’ 

Creative Sample #4: New version of hero 

The new site had a similar section farther down the homepage that focused on the exclusivity of the event’s value prop, but it was shortened to make it a quicker read for visitors who scanned the page. 

Every section included a micro curiosity hook designed to pull visitors to the next section or another part of the site. For example, the last column in this section had the copy ‘Every detail of this event is engineered for the ADHD brain – from agenda to room setup. Even our coffee.’ followed by a link with the copy ‘Which matters because →’. 

That link took visitors to the next section which explained specific steps the team took to build an event for people with ADHD, including the coffee: ‘A proprietary blend developed from studies on cayenne pepper and cognitive function – specifically how it supports memory consolidation and helps move information from short-term to long-term retention.’ 

Creative Sample #5: New homepage’s fifth section 

Farther down the page, there was a clearer section to help the ideal customer self-select, that included the line ‘The Grow Retreat is not for everyone. Here’s who belongs in the room.’ 

Creative Sample #6: New homepage’s ninth section 

RESULTS 

Comparing the same timeframe year-over-year from 2025 to 2026 (April 17th through July 25th): 

• Traffic increased 403%, from 437 sessions to 2,200 sessions (the team estimates about a quarter of that traffic lift came from an increased email and social media push) 
• Leads increased from one to eight (form submissions requesting info about attending the event, like the VIP Experience Packet) 
• Conversion rate improved 57% (clicking to get on the waitlist) 

“Before the redesign, people landed on the page and thought it was an ADHD event. It's not. It's a business growth event – it's just built in a way that ADHD brains can actually use what they're learning. That distinction was getting lost, and it was costing us the right audience,” Scheller said. 

STEP #4: Define the action and the reason for the visitor 

Let’s go back to that focus you created in Step #1. Is it clear on your new page? What do you want them to do? And what’s in it for them? There are three ways you can make the next step obvious: 

• Outcome Clarity: What they get immediately after the click/search/form submit 
• Process Clarity: What happens in the next 60 seconds 
• Risk Clarity: What you won’t do (spam, aggressive follow-up, hidden fees) 

In the below example, the search box is the real CTA – ‘search job title or keyword.’ 

But that CTA alone isn’t enough. Before your ideal prospect gets there, they need to understand why they should take the action and what happens next – which is why a head/subhead change had such a big impact on conversion. 

Quick Case Study #3: Job search engine increases conversion rate 2.8x by clarifying the benefit and outcome of the desired action 

BEFORE 

The headline of Role’s homepage was ‘succeed with AI’ with a subhead of ‘Find jobs where AI helps you stand out.’ 

Creative Sample #7: Role homepage, before 

In one-on-one conversations founder Deven Patel had with job seekers, they didn’t understand the message on the page. 

AFTER 

So he researched some new headline options though “mostly research on Reddit/LinkedIn combined with ChatGPT around what the current pain points were for job seekers,” explained Deven Patel, founder, Role. 

Patel ran an A/B test from April 3, 2026, to May 17, 2026. For the treatment, he changed the headline to ‘Find real jobs’ with a subhead of ‘Direct from employer sites. No ghosts. No reposts.’ 

Creative Sample #8: Role homepage, after 

RESULTS 

The first variant was shown to 1,207 visitors and the second variant to 1,379 visitors. 

The conversion rate improved from 24% to 67%, a 2.8x improvement. “Makes sense in hindsight as ‘find real jobs’ was much clearer than ‘succeed with AI’ for the job seeker audience,” he said. 

The next step after the search was job view. Since the results between the control and treatment were relatively flat (73% versus 67%), it indicates that nothing Patel changed to get more searches hurt the quality of the visitors moving on to the next step. 

Action Box: Open your top landing page and rewrite only two lines  

Rewrite the headline and subhead so they answer: Who is this for? What will I get? What happens next? 

If you want feedback, post in the AI Guild community with your current headline/subhead and the one next step you want the visitor to take. 

This article was distributed through the free MarketingSherpa email newsletter. 

Related resources 

How to fix websites where visitors browse but never buy 

Landing Page Optimization: 5 factors that lead to (and prevent) conversion 

Clarity Trumps Persuasion: 5 examples where clarity soundly beat out persuasion tactics 

AI transparency 

This is a human-conceived and -written article, assisted by AI. MeclabsAI was used to review source pitches for artificial intelligence usage, evaluate the credibility of potential sources, craft follow-up questions to sources, brainstorm the steps and advice in this article, create Open Graph and CMS thumbnail images, and provide copy-edit suggestions for the article.