Landing Page: What Is It and What Is It Not?

In this blog post, we’ll demystify the concept of a landing page and answer the questions of what a landing page is and what it is not. We’re also going to take a look at some of the best landing page examples we’ve seen in the recent months and discuss the tool stack you need to build high-converting landing pages.

1. What is a landing page on a website?

Landing page definition: A landing page is a web page, designed in a special way to encourage visitors who "landed" on it to take action.

Depending on a landing page, it could be all kinds of actions that a landing page is encouraging the visitors to take. The typical actions include registering for live or recorded webinars, downloading content, starting product evaluations, scheduling meetings and demos, purchasing software products or physical goods, and many more.

2. Where should I host my landing pages?

The majority of landing pages are hosted either on the main website domain, or a subdomain. Each of those options has its pros and cons.

• On the main website (e.g. www.website.com/landing-page)
• On a sub-domain adjacent to the main website (e.g. trial.website.com/landing-page)
  

Consider hosting your landing pages on your main website domain when you’re not planning to scale the landing page creation process, and, therefore, not planning to have many pages with similar or somewhat similar content. From the SEO landing page perspective, you’d be better off not creating web pages with identical content and placing them on the main website. Instead, create a sub-domain where you’ll be hosting all of your landing pages and exclude these domains from indexing by the search engines like Google or Bing.

3. What are the key differences between a regular webpage, a website homepage and a landing page?

Any regular webpage or website homepage can be called a landing page as long as it contains an offer, a call-to-action encouraging visitors to take your desired action. Therefore, at first glance, it may seem as though your website landing pages are very similar to your regular webpages or homepage. But here are some fundamental differences.

Landing page vs. Website homepage

Your home page is the most up-to-date reflection of your brand identity, the most accurate representation of your product portfolio, and the starting point from where your website visitors take off on a journey across your website. While your home page looks fantastic, and it should since I bet it is the most visited page on your entire website, if you take a closer look at its visitor-to-lead conversion rate, you won’t see a considerable number.

Pro tip: Your landing page is everything that your homepage is not.

Your landing page is everything that your homepage is not. Yet it’s the most goal-oriented page (or series of pages) on your website, designed in a self-sufficient way. Self-sufficient means that each landing page typically explores only one use case and tells only one story as it relentlessly keeps the visitors’ attention on the call to action. Remember, your landing pages have the purpose of converting your website traffic into the customers, while your homepage is designed to represent your brand.

Landing page vs. Regular webpage

The goal of any web page on your website is usually dictated by the position of a particular page in your website hierarchy, or sitemap. Your regular webpages are a team - they’re all interconnected, as all of them are telling parts of your website story and shaping the journey of a customer through your website. Regular website pages typically encourage visitors to start exploring the website further.

Pro tip: A regular webpage is a “team player,” while a landing page is an “army of one".

In contrast to a regular webpage, the goal of a landing page is converting the website visitors into leads by encouraging them to fill out the sign-up form. It’s the relentless focus of a landing page on the action that makes it different from a standard regular webpage or home page. Compared to a proper web page, a high-converting landing page is not a team player at all; it’s an army of one.

4. What are the key features of a landing page?

Pro tip: Landing pages convert visitors into leads better than homepage and regular webpages.

• Landing pages have one primary call-to-action
• Landing pages don’t have any navigation, external links or standard website menu
• Continue reading: Top 5 Landing Page Best Practices for B2B Marketers

5. How to drive traffic to your landing pages?

There’s one thing that your landing pages can’t live without. Many believe that this secret sauce is a drag-and-drop landing page builder, but it’s the traffic. For your landing pages to start converting your traffic into leads and customers, you’re going to bring the audience to those landing pages at first. Here are the most common sources of traffic for landing pages

Driving organic search traffic to landing pages

The rule of thumb is the more captivating your content is, the better, the more engaging your blog posts and product pages are, the more you invest in creating great-quality graphics and videos, the better organic search rankings your website will have. 

The organic search traffic is a critical part of your marketing mix that not only converts website visitors into leads better than any other traffic source, but it is virtually free of charge. Well, somewhat free of charge, as it comes at the price of hours and hours of creating great content that will then get indexed by Google, Bing, and other search engines.

Driving traffic from paid search campaigns to landing pages

Digital marketing teams are spending the most significant portions of their demand generation budgets on paid search campaigns. This is when your pay-per-click and pay-per-impression marketers and buying a share of voice to show your ads to the people searching for the terms relevant to your business. 

Maximizing the ROI of paid search campaigns is top of mind for all demand generation leaders. Therefore, the best practice is to always use landing pages for paid search campaigns.

Driving traffic from retargeting programs to landing pages

You find yourself on a “Brand X” website, go to another one, and suddenly you realize that you’re being chased by the “Brand X” ads like Brad Pitt is being chased by paparazzi. Does this sound familiar? Right! That’s what retargeting campaigns are. Until you make the target action, i.e., request a free trial, register for a demo, request pricing, the marketers at “Brand X” will keep chasing you as long as they can afford it.

Your retargeting campaigns are also quite expensive, and you should consider directing your traffic to landing pages to maximize the ROI.

If you’re being chased by the “Brand X” ads like Brad Pitt is being chased by paparazzi, that’s what we call successful retargeting in B2B marketing.

Driving traffic from email marketing campaigns to landing pages

If an email marketing tool or a marketing automation system is part of your digital marketing tech stack, you acknowledge the power of email marketing campaigns. Inexpensive, yet extremely effective... if done right, these campaigns can deliver the highest ROI compared to all other channels. 

Much like the organic traffic, the traffic from your email programs comes at virtually no cost. Yet you should consider directing your CTAs in your emails to the dedicated landing pages to maximize the visitor-to-lead conversion rate.