Most landing page copy problems aren't subtle. They're the same patterns, repeated across hundreds of pages, by teams who've read the same advice and still ended up writing the same vague, hedging, feature-first copy that gives visitors no reason to act. Ferguson's audit data makes this uncomfortable to ignore: 55% of pages fail the 'Specific Claims' check, and 82% fail 'Objection Coverage'. Four out of five pages are sending visitors away with unanswered doubts still in their heads and that's the number worth sitting with.
Vague claims that sound confident but say nothing
The most common copy mistake isn't bad writing. It's writing that sounds fine on first read but contains no actual information. 'Streamline your workflow.' 'Grow your business faster.' 'The all-in-one platform for modern teams.' These phrases have been written so many times they've lost all meaning, and visitors process them as noise rather than signal. When a page fails the Specific Claims check, it's almost always because the copy is full of this kind of language - assertions without evidence, benefits without numbers, promises without any grounding in reality.
The fix is to replace abstraction with something a visitor can actually evaluate, not more superlatives layered on top of vague claims. 'Reduces onboarding time from two weeks to three days' is a claim someone can weigh against their own situation. 'Streamlines onboarding' is not. If you can't make a specific claim because you don't have the data, that's a product marketing problem worth solving before you write another word of copy, visitors who sense they're being given marketing language instead of information tend not to come back.
One pattern worth watching for: specificity that's been accidentally edited out. Early drafts often contain real numbers and concrete outcomes. Then someone decides the copy sounds 'too salesy' or 'too narrow', and the specifics get softened into generalities. The page ends up sounding polished but saying less than the first draft did.
Ignoring objections until it's too late
Across the pages audited so far, 82% fail the Objection Coverage check. Most landing pages are written as if the visitor is already sold and just needs to find the button. They're not. They arrived with doubts, and if the copy doesn't address those doubts somewhere on the page, the visitor leaves with them intact.
Is this going to be hard to set up? Will it work with the tools I already use? What happens if I want to cancel? Is this company going to disappear in six months? Can I trust that this actually does what it says? A page that never touches any of these questions is leaving a lot of conversion on the table, because hesitant visitors don't email to ask - they just leave.
You don't need a dedicated FAQ section to handle objections, though that can help. The more effective approach is to weave objection-handling into the copy itself. A pricing section that says 'cancel any time, no questions asked' is handling an objection. A feature description that mentions 'connects to your existing CRM in under five minutes' is handling an objection. For example, a page that buries cancellation terms in a tooltip while leading with 'commitment-free' in the headline is doing the opposite of anticipating the visitor's worry: it's confirming it.
Too many calls to action, pulling in different directions
56% of pages in Ferguson's dataset fail the Single Primary CTA check. This one surprises people, because the instinct when a page isn't converting is often to add more options - a demo button here, a free trial there, a 'learn more' link just in case. Adding more CTAs feels like reducing friction, but it introduces a different kind, visitors have to decide which action is right for them before they've decided anything else.
When a page has three or four competing calls to action, visitors have to make a decision before they've made a decision. They have to figure out which action is right for them, which requires understanding the difference between a demo and a trial and a 'get started' and a 'contact sales' - and most visitors won't do that work. They'll do nothing instead. A single clear primary action, with secondary options genuinely subordinated in visual weight, removes that friction.
The related failure is what Ferguson's audit checks call 'Post-CTA Clarity' - 64% of pages fail this one. Visitors who are ready to click want to know what happens next. Does clicking 'Start free trial' require a credit card? Will someone call them? Is there a setup process? Copy that leaves this ambiguous creates a moment of hesitation right at the point of highest intent. A single line beneath the CTA button - 'No credit card required' or 'Takes about three minutes to set up' - can do a lot of work.
Writing for the product instead of the problem
This is the copy mistake that's hardest to see when you're close to the product. The page describes what the product does - its features, its interface, its integrations - rather than the situation the visitor is in and the outcome they're trying to reach. It's an understandable failure. The team knows the product intimately and finds it genuinely interesting. But the visitor doesn't care about the product yet. They care about their problem.
The practical test is to read your copy and ask: does this describe my product, or does it describe my customer's life before and after using it? 'Automated reporting dashboard with 40+ templates' describes the product. 'Stop spending Friday afternoons rebuilding the same spreadsheet' describes the customer's life. Both might appear on the same page, but the second one is what earns the attention that makes the first one land.
This isn't a new observation. 'Benefits over features' has been in every copywriting guide for thirty years. A common way proximity to the product distorts copy decisions: teams default to describing the interface because they've spent months in it, and that familiarity makes feature language feel more concrete than it is to someone arriving cold. Getting an outside reader to tell you which sentences describe the product and which describe the customer is one of the more useful things you can do before you publish.
The landing page audit checklist covers this distinction in more detail, and if you're trying to diagnose why a page that looks good still isn't converting, the diagnosis framework is worth working through systematically. A page with flat traffic but strong engagement metrics is usually a copy problem; a page with high bounce rates from cold traffic is more likely an offer or targeting problem. The distinction matters before you start rewriting.
What to fix first when everything feels broken
If you're looking at a page with multiple copy problems and limited time, the audit data suggests a clear priority order. Start with objection coverage - it fails on more pages than anything else, and it's often fixable without a full rewrite. Identify the two or three most common reasons a visitor might not convert, and make sure the page addresses each of them explicitly. Then look at your CTA structure: if you have more than one primary action competing for attention, pick one and demote the rest.
Specific claims come next. Go through the page and mark every sentence that makes an assertion. For each one, ask whether a sceptical visitor could verify or evaluate it. If the answer is no, either add the evidence or rewrite the claim to be more concrete. This process is slower than it sounds, but it's the kind of work that compounds, in practice, three claims a visitor can actually evaluate tend to do more than twelve they can't.
Finally, read the copy from the visitor's perspective, not the product team's. If the first thing a visitor learns is what the product does rather than what problem it solves, that's the rewrite to prioritise. The Ferguson benchmark data shows how consistently these patterns appear across different types of pages - it's not a niche problem for early-stage teams, it shows up everywhere.