What Are Landing Pages And When Do I Use Them?

I'm regularly asked by my clients - "What is landing page?"  At other times clients know the term, but they tend to use it in the context of a page used for Google Ads clicks. 

The basic definition of a landing page is a page that you land your website visitor on.

Why Are Landing Pages Used?

Landing pages are pages that have three core characteristics;

• They are focused on specific user intent.
• They have few distractions like menu bars and blog posts.
• They have a  clear call to action.

As a  result, landing pages have a higher conversion rate. That means if you pay $10,000 for specific plumbing traffic (e.g. bathroom plumbing), you will get more conversions [in this case, phone calls] from a landing page focussed on bathroom plumbing rather than from a general website page like your home page.

What's The Difference Between A Landing Page And Other Pages On The Website Like The Homepage?

The homepage is essentially the front door to your shop. The goal of the homepage is to get people where they want to be inside your website. 

For example, if they come to your site and want to find out about drain clearing, the home page’s goal is to navigate them to the drain clearing page.

Your service pages and your location pages are the pages that you should consider to be landing pages. The goal of a landing page is about conversion.

It’s essentially a sales page about your service or your service in a specific location. It tells the website visitor why they should contact you over, and above the other plumbers, they could hire.

How Do You Get Visitors To A Landing Page?

Your visitors can come to your landing page directly without coming to the home page of your site. 

You can link them to a landing page using paid traffic. Here you have control over where the visitor goes. 

Alternatively, you can also try to get organic traffic to the page. Here Google decides that your landing page is the best option for the search term that the person is looking for at the time.

What Pages Should Be Landing Pages On Your Website?

There are  two main groups of pages you should set up as landing pages;

1. All the pages you write about your services. That's bathroom plumbing, kitchen plumbing, drain clearing, emergency plumbing, gas plumbing, dripping taps of you are a plumber.
2. All the pages outline the service areas in which you operate. These pages show the services you offer in specific suburbs within your service area.

There's less need to consider your About Us page, your blog pages and your Contact Us page as a landing page. You should still think about the goal of each of these pages and how well they achieve that goal.

Potential Customers Buying Intent And The Relevance To The Landing Page.

Most visitors to a plumbing website are bottom-of-the-funnel visitors. They have a pressing need to fix a plumbing problem and are looking for a solution. Most plumbing landing pages need to address this.

However, there are times when you want to use landing pages for different visitor intent. For example, you can use Google Display Advertising to build a potential customer base of people interested in renovating bathroom or kitchen plumbing.  

The visitor's goal is primarily to learn more, so the intent of your landing page needs to match that. For example, you could land them on a page with a PDF about what to look for when doing the job and all the inside tips. The goal is to get them to join your mailing list in exchange for a relevant lead magnet.

You would format a landing page like this differently, focusing on the email capture rather than getting them to phone you. Further, it would demonstrate your business's skills and knowledge to help them in the planning stage.

Dynamic Landing Pages

It is possible to add personalisation elements to landing pages to help improve conversion. Usually, when you control the source of the traffic, i.e. Google Ads, email or Facebook advertising, you can pass elements to the landing page that would help it change.

If appropriately used, dynamic landing pages can increase conversion by 200%. It's worth considering and testing if you get enough traffic.

The most common example of this is dynamic keyword insertion from Google Ads. You insert the keyword area that the customers searched for on Google onto the landing page to make the landing page more relevant.

Another example is where you have their name, and you pass this to the landing page from the link in the email.

At times this can look creepy or wonky. I think we've all seen ads where there is personalisation for your location that is not even relevant to where you live. That’s because the ad has delivered a geographic personalisation from your internet IP address and in Australia that can bear no resemblance to where you are located.

Plumbing Landing Page Examples

Here’s why it’s important to match your searcher's intent with the landing page. I went to Google and searched for Bathroom Plumbing. I saw some Google Ads and checked the landing pages. In most cases, while the ads say bathroom or toilet plumbing, the landing pages don’t match the search intent. 

The result will be wasted click spend and poor conversions for the business owner.

Elements Of A Great Landing Page

First, you need to think about landing pages as a standalone entity it should solve the problem that the customer came to the page for

Think about these things;

• Who is going to visit the page?
• What do they need to know and understand before they can buy a service from you?
• How are you going to deliver that information in an appropriate way to their buying intent?
• How are you going to get visitors to that page?
• What do you want visitors to do at the end of their visit to the page?

The core elements of a good landing page;

1. Presenting a unique or compelling value proposition or offer. An offer is something like a free plumbing review of your home with every leaking toilet repair this month.
2. A clear sales message about your offer outlining the benefits to the customer: your customer doesn't want that dripping tap repaired. They want the constant annoying noise in the middle of the night that keeps them awake to go away.
3. A good landing page needs a clear call to action and only one call to action. If you can't stand two metres away from your landing page and understand the call-to-action, then it's not correctly set up.
4. You should only have one call to action. There's no problem repeating it at the top, middle and bottom of the page.
5. Social proof is necessary to increase the conversion rate. Social proof is the new online word of mouth. You need to add it to your landing page via reviews and or testimonials from past customers.
6. Set up the page for online reading. People online don't read everything; they skim the headlines, look at the bullet points and glance at images. You shouldn't worry about having too much text on the page. If you have set it out well,  people can read all the text if that's how they absorb information, or they can skim it if that's the way they prefer.

Where To Find Ideas For Your Landing Pages

You can look for landing page design ideas in several places. Here are three that I recommend.

Take a look at the landing page templates from specialist companies like Unbounce and Instapage, or Dribble.

Look at the landing pages used by your competitors in their advertising.

Look at the Facebook advertising research tool, find similar ads, and click on them to see the landing pages used.

Summary

Treat important pages like service pages and location pages on your plumbing website as standalone landing pages.

Build them that way from the start, and you will benefit from improved conversion rates and ongoing sales.