Picking an H1, sub-head, and CTA for your landing page

I wanted to get some insight into writing good content for hero sections.

So I did some research and looked at what the big sites (Apple, Microsoft, Shopify etc..) are using for their H1, sub-headings and CTAs (call-to-action).

I compiled them into a public spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AjjyVuycceALclUxes14JgX5WDwYixpaVAl6PxdO-lw/edit?usp=sharing

(Figure above is a word cloud of the primary and secondary CTAs)

Key Learnings

I learned a few things:

• The most common CTA is "Get started" or "Get started for free".
• "Join" and "Buy" are popular words for CTAs too.
• Established brands are more direct, for example Apple has "Buy Now" as a CTA on $1K+ product. Probably indie's would not be able to do that.
• Some sites skip the sub-head altogether. Others have very long ones that are multiple sentences long.
• It seems most headings are either descriptive (eg. "We are collaboration software") or discuss benefits (eg. "We make collaboration easy"). I didn't find any talking about pain (eg. "Stop wasting time on bad collaboration software")

Update: Andrew Kamphey from https://BetterSheets.co did a deeper analysis about this on YouTube. See https://youtu.be/QNfHHeUa9p8?si=42QgCN2EczyEKZEi&t=777

He found some interesting stuff:

• H1 length is an average of 35.1 words
• Subhead length is an average of 11.3 words
• 31% of CTAs have the word "Free"
• 9% of CTAs have the word "Sign"
• 40% of CTAs have the word "Start"
• 27% of CTAs have the word "Get"
• 4.4% of CTAs have the word "Buy" or "Try"
• Subheads have an average of 1.7 sentences.

His sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hqmydZvATbL_iU3fe-eQj7uX4eEEsvhzSMFn3wivub4/edit#gid=0