Landing pages, and why sending ad traffic to your homepage wastes it

Most small businesses have no landing pages and do not need many. But if you are paying for traffic, or running a campaign of any kind, the page it arrives on decides whether that money turns into anything.

What a landing page is, and is not

A landing page is a page built for one audience arriving for one reason, with one action available.

That is the whole definition, and the important half is the last part. Your homepage offers a visitor a navigation menu, six services, an about page, a blog and a phone number. That range is correct for somebody who arrived by typing your name. It is wrong for somebody who clicked an ad about emergency boiler repair, because now they have to find the boiler bit themselves.

A landing page is not a page with the menu removed and a big button added. It is a page whose argument is aimed at one situation.

Why homepage traffic converts worse

Three reasons, and they compound.

The message does not match. Somebody searched a specific phrase, saw an ad about that phrase, clicked, and arrived somewhere that talks about your company in general. The thread breaks, and a meaningful share leave rather than hunt.

Too many choices. Every additional option costs some of the people who would have taken the one you wanted. A homepage is a menu; a landing page is a recommendation.

No obvious next step. Homepages tend to have several calls to action of roughly equal weight. A landing page should have one, repeated, and nothing competing with it.

The seven parts that make one work

A headline that repeats the search. If the ad said “emergency boiler repair in Naperville”, the headline says close to that. This sounds crude and it is the single most reliable improvement available, because it tells the visitor in half a second that they are in the right place.

A subheading that adds the reason to keep reading. Availability, price, speed, guarantee. One line.

The action, immediately. Above the fold, in the visitor’s reach on a phone. For a local service business that is almost always a phone number and a short form, not a “learn more”.

Proof that a stranger can check. Reviews, real photographs, a named result. The weakest proof is a testimonial you chose and typed yourself; the strongest is something they can go and verify.

The objection, answered. Every service has one thing that stops people buying — cost, disruption, whether you cover their area, how soon you can come. Name it and answer it, rather than hoping it does not occur to them.

The action again. People who are convinced by the bottom of the page should not have to scroll back up.

Nothing else. No blog links, no full navigation, no six other services. Each one is a door out of the room.

The mistakes that quietly waste money

Sending every ad to the same page. If you run three ad groups, you need three pages, or at least three headlines. One page cannot match three different searches.

Asking for too much. Every field costs you submissions. Name and one way to contact them is usually enough; you can ask the rest on the call.

A form that fails silently. Test it. A broken form on a page you are paying to send traffic to is the most expensive fault a small business can have, and it looks exactly like a bad month.

No tracking. If you cannot tell which click produced which enquiry, nobody can improve the campaign, including the ad platform. This is the difference between advertising and gambling.

Slow. Paid traffic on a phone is the least patient audience you will ever have. They did not seek you out, they clicked an ad, and they will click back.

Do you actually need one

Honestly, most local businesses do not, at least not yet.

If your enquiries come from search, referrals and your Google listing, your effort is better spent making your ordinary service pages do this job properly. Most of the seven parts above apply to a good service page anyway.

You need landing pages when you are spending money on traffic, when you are running a campaign with a specific offer, or when you have one service that is genuinely different from the rest of your business. Outside those three, a landing page is a page to maintain that nobody visits.

The page nobody designs

What happens after somebody submits the form is usually an afterthought, and it is doing more work than people realise.

Say what happens next, with a time. “Thanks, we will call you within one working day” is worth considerably more than “Thanks”. It sets an expectation, and it stops the person submitting the same enquiry to two competitors while they wait to see who replies first.

Give them something to do if they are in a hurry. The phone number belongs on the confirmation page too. Somebody who filled in a form at nine at night may well ring at nine the next morning, and making them go and find the number again is a small, unnecessary loss.

Send an email immediately. Not a marketing sequence, an acknowledgement. It confirms the message arrived, it puts your name in their inbox, and it gives them something to reply to. It is also how you find out your form is broken, because you will notice when the acknowledgements stop.

Make it a real page with its own address. A confirmation that appears in place of the form, on the same URL, cannot be counted. A separate page can be, which is how you measure the conversion rate this whole piece depends on.

Do not sell on it. They have already said yes. The confirmation page is where you reassure, not where you upsell the next tier.

None of this is expensive and most sites have none of it. The pattern is the same as the rest of this article: the cheap, unglamorous part is the part that decides whether the money spent getting somebody there turns into anything.

How to tell whether yours is working

One number: the share of visitors who make contact. For a local service landing page with matched traffic, low single digits is poor, five per cent is respectable, and above ten means something is going right and worth understanding.

What matters more than the number is measuring it at all, before and after any change. Without that you are redesigning on opinion, and the opinion of whoever is loudest usually wins.

If you are running ads, the paid advertising page covers how we handle the campaign side, and the web design service page covers the build. The honest answer for a lot of businesses is that fixing the service pages comes first, and the nine things a local service site needs is where that starts.

The short version

One audience, one argument, one action. Repeat the search in the headline, put the phone number where a thumb can reach it, answer the objection, and remove everything else. Then measure the share who get in touch, because a landing page you are not measuring is just a page.