How to Design an Aviation Website That Attracts and Converts

As the first thing many potential clients will see, your aviation website is a workhorse for your business.

Gone are the days of generic templated designs and text-heavy pages. To attract and convert discerning leads into clients, your website should exude your brand’s image while providing a seamless experience for visitors to find information quickly.

For niche aviation businesses — be it a skydiving company, fixed-base operator, or cutting-edge flight technology developer — the challenge lies in crafting a digital experience that resonates with your specific audience. 

There’s no singular step to great aviation web design. A successful approach — which we’ll outline in this article — combines marketing skills, technical know-how, and creativity.

Aviation Website Design Tips

An attractive and effective website design for aviation requires a number of elements to work in concert: 

• Memorable branding
• Effective SEO
• Engaging content
• Striking visuals
• Seamless navigation

While the nuts-and-bolts of clean navigation and fast load times are important, so too are features like exciting video clips or motion graphics as well as strategic elements like SEO.

The more alive and relevant your site feels, the more likely you’ll convert visitors into clients. 

In this article, we’ll show you how to do that, whether you’re starting from scratch or embarking on a site redesign. Here, we’re diving into five key areas:

1. User Journey Flow
2. Landing Pages
3. On-Page SEO
4. Mobile-Friendly Design
5. Calls-To-Action (CTAs)

As we navigate each, you’ll see how creating the best aviation website design is both an art and a science. Our first tip, especially, shows how site mechanics and design features simultaneously support converting leads into clients.

#1: User Journey Flow & Navigation

Navigating the digital airspace of a company’s website should feel like taking to clear skies. 

Minding the user journey flow ensures visitors:

• Understand your product
• Feel intrigued by your backstory
• See how you differ from competitors
• Engage easily with your business

Whether a user takes off from your homepage, flies in from an ad link, or lands on your blog while researching a specific topic, your website design should carefully curate their experience.

User journey flow is about creating a logical and intuitive roadmap. Developing a visual representation of your site while under development can reveal potential hang-ups for users (like broken links or a disjointed experience — i.e. flow). The use of links, buttons, calls-to-action, and menu navigation tools will guide users to learn more about your services, contact your team, or make a purchase.

A landing page such as the one described above can serve multiple functions on your site. Let’s take a closer look.

#2: Landing Pages

Just as pilots need precise coordinates, your website should offer targeted landing pages that cater to the specific needs and interests of your core audience. These pages serve as virtual runways, guiding visitors toward valuable information and enticing them to take action.

Landing pages, or portal pages, are standalone web pages that can link from your homepage or your main menu. Brands can also use landing pages as strategic assets for email marketing campaigns, search engine optimization (SEO), and promotion on social media. At a minimum, you can design landing pages to give potential clients info about your products or services. Or, you can create topic or pain point-specific landing pages that offer highly personalized and persuasive content, increasing the likelihood of conversion. 

Here are a few quick tips for aviation website landing pages:

• Focus on solutions

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and gear your landing page content toward common industry challenges or how your product solves their problem. 

• Here’s a solid example of a solutions-focused landing page, by SkyGrid. Take note of the concise descriptions of the problems AerialOS helps solve, combined with relatable graphics. 

• Keep it simple

Developing landing pages organizes your website content by topic. Don’t undercut the function by overloading your content. Stick to one topic per page.

• Avoid bait-and-switch

If you use landing pages for ad links or posts on social media, especially, pay attention to the origin of the inbound lead and make sure the message they clicked for is provided clearly when they arrive.

Speaking of inbound leads, one of the most productive things you can do for your business is to improve your website’s rank on search engines, particularly Google. In the next step, we’ll give you some pointers.

#3. On-Page SEO

Even a beautiful, well-thought-out website can fail without an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. There’s both a technical and creative component to strong SEO. 

First, perform keyword research and study search trends to understand the actual language your target client would type into Google. Aim to capture a wide but motivated aviation audience by deploying these keywords across your site – including on the back end of your content management system and user-facing pages.

The goal, generally, is to optimize every corner of your website so that your brand ranks as high as possible in search results when a user is looking for your product or is researching a problem your business solves.

With so much hinging on SEO, it’s highly recommended you engage with a professional for these services. Here are the five biggest factors behind SEO success:

1. Keywords: The top phrases or terms a buyer or aviation professional would type into Google that relate to your business. If your product or service has a geographic tie, include localized terms as well.

2. Quality: Search engine algorithms, for the most part, reward high-quality content – which is partly judged by originality and how the average user acts on your site, such as leaving quickly because the content wasn’t helpful.

3. Navigation: This involves how users navigate your site via menus, buttons, and links. But it also can be helped or hurt by your site map, which tells search engines how to index your content.

4. Page speed: Sub-sonic won’t cut it here. Even if your site speed lags down due to amazing content, the lag alone will hurt your search rank. 

5. Mobile-friendly: Build your site with a mobile-first mentality to ensure the design and flow make sense for users on small screens. Because many aviation businesses fall short in this area (or haven’t undergone a web redesign since phones surpassed desktop traffic), we’ve created a full section on this topic below.

#4: Mobile-Friendly Design & Responsive Layouts

Like most consumers and B2B buyers, aviation professionals are constantly on the move, relying on smartphones and tablets to stay connected. As such, your website must be optimized for mobile devices, which starts with using responsive layouts.

Mobile-friendly design means your website displays and functions smoothly on smartphones and tablets. To do this, consider:

• The look of your pages like choosing the right image resolution and making sure graphics or animation appear as intended.
• Creating multi-media content to avoid things like a wall of text that takes a small-screen user too long to scroll past.
• The placement of links and buttons to guide navigation without cluttering a small-screen view.
• Settings like opening links in new windows and document downloads in universal formats like PDF.
• Including search and filter aids so that users can find information or products they’re interested in without needing to pinch-to-zoom or scroll manually through inventory.
• The use of responsive layouts so that pages automatically adjust and adapt to different screen sizes and orientations. 

Together, these elements ensure that your website remains accessible and user-friendly across all devices, from desktop computers to mobile phones. Here’s a great example of the site we developed for Butler Parachutes. As you can see, the site exhibits fast load times even with ample images and videos and Butler’s site is home to loads of technical information for customers, available in efficient PDF format.

While mobile-friendly design helps your brand reach consumers on the go, moving each potential client toward conversion requires additional strategy.

#5: Calls-To-Action (CTAs)

Whether it’s scheduling a consultation, requesting a demo, or signing up for industry updates, effective CTAs prompt visitors to take the next step and engage with your brand. The most popular CTA methods are:

• Clickable Buttons: These might say something like Learn More, Contact Us, or Book Now.
• Hyperlinks: These can be placed with natural language over related terms or with clear prompts such as Click here for….
• Pop-ups: These messages can be timed to show if a user is statistically close to leaving your site or can appear for special offers.

Clear and compelling calls-to-action serve as runway markings, guiding users toward your strategic conversion points (like email signups or free consultations). By using persuasive language, compelling design, and strategic placement, CTAs can increase engagement, drive conversions, and ultimately, boost your bottom line.

Variety is key for deploying effective CTAs. Take a look at Wicked Wingsuits’ website, for example. From the site’s homepage to FAQ page, visitors see clear CTAs that address a range of potential interests including renting a wingsuit, finding an experienced coach, or attending an upcoming event. 

In developing Wicked Wingsuits’ site, we helped the company modernize its brand and improve its ranking in search engines when customers are looking for suit rental information online. 

By undertaking a complete redesign, niche aviation businesses can create a digital experience that increases visibility and drives tangible results. At Beyond Marketing, we specialize in creating industry-leading websites with beautiful displays and comprehensive strategies for successful content and SEO. If you’re looking to partner with a full-service marketing agency to build a website that attracts and converts, we’re just a phone call or email away. Contact Beyond Marketing today to get started!