A landing page is wherever a visit begins. In advertising it means something narrower and more useful: a page built for one service, one intent and one action. The distinction matters because the money is lost in the gap between the two definitions.
Briefly explained
- The page somebody arrives on from an ad, a listing or a link.
- Built to answer one search, not to introduce the company.
- Point an ad at the home page and you pay for the mistake twice.
- It is where expensive clicks either convert or leak.
Why not just use the home page?
Because a home page has to serve everybody, which means it answers nobody’s exact question.
Somebody who searched for one specific service clicked because those words matched. Landing them on a page listing ten services and a company history asks them to search again inside your site. Most will not. They go back to the results, and you paid for the click either way.
There is a second cost in paid search: page relevance feeds Quality Score, so the mismatch raises your click price as well as wasting the visit.
What does a good one carry?
In roughly this order down the page.
- The service and the area in the headline, in the customer’s words
- A phone number visible without scrolling on a phone. See above the fold.
- Price framing: ranges, financing, what moves the number
- Proof: reviews, license, warranty, photographs of real work
- One action, repeated as the page gets longer. See call to action.
Where do they usually fail?
The usual failures are not subtle.
- Stock photography where photographs of real work should be
- A form asking for eight fields before anyone has been given a reason to trust you
- Copy about the company rather than about the problem
- A page that loads slowly on a phone, which undoes everything above it
Should it be a page or a whole section?
Depends on the traffic.
Paid traffic suits a focused page with minimal navigation. Organic service pages belong inside the site, linked to and from the rest of it, because they also have to rank. The content is similar. The surroundings are not.
What do the terms mean?
- Landing page experience: Google’s assessment of whether the page answers the ad. One of three Quality Score components.
- Hero: The first screen, before scrolling.
- Above the fold: What is visible there.
- Form field: One question on a form. Each one costs you some share of submissions.
- Conversion rate: How many of the arrivals did what the page asked. What the page is judged on.
Owner questions
