Landing page versus homepage
A homepage has to serve everyone: new visitors, returning customers, job seekers, suppliers. A landing page serves one kind of visitor who arrived with one intent. Someone who clicked an ad for 'emergency furnace repair' should land on a page about emergency furnace repair with a phone number, not on a homepage that also mentions duct cleaning and financing. The match between what they clicked and what they see is what makes landing pages convert.
What a good landing page contains
- A headline that repeats the promise of the ad or the search that brought the visitor.
- A short explanation of the offer and who it is for.
- Proof: reviews, numbers, photos, guarantees.
- One form or one button, repeated down the page, asking for as little information as possible.
- Few or no other links. The menu is often removed so the only way forward is the action.
- Fast loading on a phone, because most ad traffic is mobile.
Landing pages and SEO
Pages built for a specific service in a specific area ('WordPress maintenance in Barrie') are landing pages too, and they can rank in search as well as take ad traffic, provided each has genuinely different content rather than one template with the town name swapped. That is the basis of local SEO. Pages that exist only for ads are often set to 'noindex' so they do not compete with the main site in search.