You are super excited to get going, you have your domain name and in the process of working with an affordable website designer or maybe you are designing the site yourself. However, you just realised you might need a coming soon page or particular landing page to help promote the message about your new small business.

Within this article, I’ll share with you some ideas and tips on things to consider when putting together a coming soon page.

What is a coming soon page?

A coming soon page is basically a holding page which sits on your chosen domain to provide visitors with information about your business, service, or product which is launching shortly. Below is two examples of a coming soon page.

Few reasons to why you should consider having a coming soon page

Here are a few ideas to why you might consider having a “coming soon” page for your new website.

1. SEO headstart – By having a page up on your new domain will send a message to the google bot gods that you are coming soon. It also helps to start the indexing on your keywords and phrases for your online business. Being honest very unlikely you will be ranking at number one if you are in competitive space; however, the process of having a page up gives you an early jump before you go live.
2. Collect Leads – Another good reason to have a coming soon or specialised landing page before you build out your main website with your web designer. Is to collect leads straight away for your business. You can receive leads so you can notify visitors you when your site goes live and are open for business! You can want to collect leads to provide a special discount to first-time visitors, or you might want to have a simple contact form so visitors can directly get in contact to learn more about your business.
3. Survey Vistors– Having a dedicated coming soon page can also be used to survey your potential visitors to help better understand the needs and requirements, so you best meet their needs with your new website when you go live.

There are heaps of reasons to why can be a good idea to set upcoming soon page, splash page, holding page or particular landing page before you go live with your primary business.

How would you use a coming soon page for with your new website?

So you have decided that you want to have page the coming page up as soon as possible. To help you get started here are five essential things for you to consider with your particular landing page.

1. Get your SEO set up correctly on the page.

What do mean by setting up correctly, you will want to make sure you have your site title and tag line set up correctly to match with the business name you want to be known for and main keywords you would like to be discovered online.

The next thing you will want to consider is your meta description for your page. It’s good to provide some more details and actions you would like your visitors to do if they find you doing a google search. It also helps the search engines with learning about your site and page. If you are unsure how to set up, you can ask your web developer to help with this setup. We use a smart crawler plugin by WPMU on our sites to help with this process; it makes the installation so much easier. It also provides a nice preview on how you will look on the Google Search Results.

2. Ensure copy is targeted to your audience

The second important thing to consider is the copy of your page you want to make sure it’s written for your target audience and use the same tone and language which resonates with your audience. As you are only printing a small bit of copy for your coming soon page, you have a good opportunity to help address and solve or query a problem your audience might be seeking answers. If the copy is not your strength, it sometimes might be worth considering hiring a copywriter to help with the page copy. A copy can easily break or reward your site it’s super important to get right.

3. Define your Style and Branding

First impressions count right! Yes, they do. Work with your designer to ensure they have captured your business branding and style to help carry through your branding with the design of the page. Consider carefully the font combinations and brand colours you need for your website. We like our clients to work with only two font combinations and two to three colour combinations on the site. Less is More in the website game. There are some fantastic free tools available to help choose your style and branding, take a look at our free resources page for more details.

4. Pick the right Images and logos

Another super important element to consider on your site is picking the right photos and vectors to use on your coming soon page. Sometimes you don’t even need any other images. However there are some free image sources to get royalty-free images if you need, once again check out our resources page for details. If you do insist on using photographs, try to get some professional photos taken which you can then use in your website as well.

5. Have a Clear Call to action (CTA)

Honestly, there is no point in setting up a coming soon page if you’re going to say “coming soon”, “stay tuned”. Your job is to get your visitors to take action from collecting an email address, sharing your page on their social media channels, providing feedback, completing a survey, watching a video or calling your office to find out more information. Please please tell me you will have a clear call to action set up. Your website designer can help you with laying out the page to ensure you can ensure that your CTA is set up correctly to get visitors to take action.

Bonus: Make sure the page is mobile responsive

Finally, make sure the page is also looking good on tablet devices and mobile phones. With more people researching and navigating the web on the mobile phone, you must be looking good on mobile. We use Divi themes on all our websites as we find it just works beautifully when it comes to designing the page for mobile as well.

Conclusion

There are definitely more things to consider when setting up your landing page or coming soon page for your new small business. Would we recommend having a coming soon page? Yes, and No, If the website is a brand new site and the lead time to have the completed site is longer than 2 weeks we would recommend a coming soon page. If it is shorter than two weeks to going live and it’s not a new site, I personally don’t see the point of focusing on setting up such page.

However, we do offer all our own customers a free coming soon or landing page if they are selecting the small business website package. If you have questions about how to set up such a page, you are more than welcome to get in contact or reach out via social media to see how we can help you out.

Listen to our podcast on Coming Soon Pages