What Is a Landing Page? How to Create One

When an ad or a search result brings someone to your website, the page they land on decides whether the click turns into an enquiry. That makes the landing page a sensible place to start improving results: you have already paid for the traffic.

This guide covers:

• What a landing page is and how it differs from your home page
• How to build one that turns ad and search traffic into enquiries
• How landing pages fit into SEO
• Practical ways to raise the conversion rate
• How to measure and improve the pages over time

We run Google Ads and SEO for companies that win their customers through search. If your ads already bring in the right people, the page they land on is usually the quickest route to more leads.

A landing page is the page a visitor arrives on after clicking an ad, a search result or a link in an email, and it is built to get that visitor to do one thing.

That single goal is what separates it from the rest of your website. An ordinary page tells the visitor about many things; a landing page asks for one step. That step might be booking a meeting, requesting a quote, downloading a guide in exchange for an email address or buying a product.

There are three common types:

• Lead generation pages ask for contact details in exchange for something of value, such as a guide, a demo or a first meeting.
• Sales pages are built for a direct purchase or booking, with the price, the offer and a clear button to buy.
• Click-through pages answer the visitor’s questions and make the case before passing them on to the checkout or the booking form.

Landing pages are often talked about as if they were all campaign pages with no menu. In practice there are two kinds, and they need different treatment:

• Campaign pages for Google Ads, paid social and email. Removing the menu here keeps the visitor on the one thing you want them to do.
• SEO landing pages, built to rank for a particular search, such as a service in a particular city. These need navigation, because people arriving from Google often want to look around before they get in touch.

The difference shows up in your budget. On a campaign page you pay for every click, so each visitor who wanders off through the menu is money spent for nothing. An SEO page with no navigation has the opposite problem: it loses the visitors who are not ready to get in touch yet.

A home page has to help every visitor find their way. A landing page has to get one kind of visitor to do one thing.

Your home page receives everyone: existing customers looking for a phone number, prospects comparing suppliers, job applicants and journalists. A landing page receives someone who has already shown what they want, by clicking a particular ad or searching for a particular term.

When should you use which?

• Use a landing page when you pay for the traffic, when the offer is aimed at a particular audience, or when you want to measure a single campaign on its own.
• Let the home page take the traffic when people search for your company name and already know who you are.

Send an ad for a specific service to your home page and the visitor has to find that service themselves. Every second they spend looking is a chance for them to go back to Google and click a competitor.

The same ad budget returns very different results depending on where it lands. If you are not sure where your ad traffic lands today, our free search audit will show you.

The first thing a visitor sees should say what you do and why they should choose you. From there, a page that converts deals with doubts, builds trust and makes the next step obvious.

It also keeps the attention ratio low. The attention ratio is the number of things a visitor can click compared with the number of goals the page has. A campaign page with one goal and one clickable button has a ratio of 1:1. Give the same page ten clickable links across the menu and footer, one of them the button, and the ratio becomes 10:1: nine of those links lead away from what you want the visitor to do.

A structure that works for most landing pages, from top to bottom:

1. A headline that mirrors the ad or the search, with a subheading that explains the offer
2. An image or short video that showcases what the customer gets
3. Proof: reviews, testimonials or client logos
4. Three to five benefits, written from the customer’s side rather than as technical specifications
5. Answers to the usual objections, such as price, contract length and what happens after they get in touch
6. The button again at the bottom, for those who read to the end

Each section removes one reason not to get in touch, which is why the same structure works in so many industries.

Compared with sending traffic to a general page, a landing page gives you four things:

• A higher conversion rate. A page built around one service and one action usually turns more of its visitors into enquiries than a page that tries to cover everything.
• A clearer experience. With one message and one action, visitors do not have to work out where to go next.
• Better use of your budget. One audience and one offer per page lets you say exactly the right thing to the people you are paying to reach.
• Cleaner measurement. When a page serves one campaign, its numbers tell you how that campaign is performing and what to change next.

Building the page is only the start. Conversion rate optimisation is the ongoing work of making it better.

Landing pages decide how much you get back from every pound you spend on traffic.

Google Ads and most other paid channels are auctions in which you pay per click, and what you can afford to bid depends on what a click is worth to you. Say your landing page turns 2 per cent of visitors into leads and a competitor’s turns 3 per cent. For the same cost per lead, they can pay half as much again for each click, or bid the same as you and pay less for every lead.

A better page keeps paying back for as long as it is live, while a bigger click budget is a cost you carry every month. A better page also lifts every channel that sends traffic to it, from Google Ads and SEO to email, referrals and direct visits. A budget increase helps one channel, and only for as long as you keep paying.

A landing page earns its keep when it has one purpose, speaks to one defined audience and is simple to act on. It matters for SEO too, which we come to further down.

Start with one audience, one offer and one goal, then make the headline, the content and the images serve that goal and nothing else. That means knowing who the page is for and what they need to hear before they act. The sections below cover the parts that matter most.

The headline is the first thing visitors read, and it decides whether they read anything else. It should confirm that they have come to the right place and tell them what they will get.

• Be clear and brief. Say what you offer in plain words. Clever wordplay loses the visitor who only skims.
• Echo the ad or the search. If someone searched for “forklift hire in Leeds”, the headline should say forklift hire in Leeds.
• Use the words your customers search for. On an SEO landing page the headline is usually the H1, so the search term there helps the page rank as well.

Copy on a landing page should make sense on a single read. Unbounce’s 2024 Conversion Benchmark Report found that landing pages written at a simple reading level (US school grades 5 to 7, roughly ages 10 to 13) converted nearly twice as well as pages written at a professional level.

Plain does not mean simplistic, and it suits expert audiences too. A finance director comparing ERP systems would also rather not read a sentence three times.

• Short sentences, one point in each
• Everyday words before jargon, and any technical term that has to stay explained straight away
• Write about the customer’s problem, not about your organisation
• Read the copy aloud: if you stumble over a sentence, rewrite it

Every word the visitor has to decode is a chance to lose them to a competitor who was clearer.

The hero image is the large image at the top of the page. Together with the headline, it tells visitors within a second or two whether they are in the right place.

• Show what the customer gets: the product, the result, or the people who will do the work.
• Support the headline rather than compete with it. Text laid over a busy photo is hard to read on a phone.
• Keep the file light. A large, uncompressed hero image is a frequent cause of slow loading, and you pay for every visitor who leaves before it appears.

Between someone seeing your ad and becoming a paying customer there are four steps: the ad itself, the message on the page, the reason to act and the effort it takes to act. The ad is the first; the landing page controls the other three.

The ad decides who clicks. Make it narrow enough that the right people recognise themselves and the wrong ones scroll past:

• Say exactly who you work for and which problem you solve
• Give a reason to click now, such as an offer or a low-commitment first step
• Target the audience that fits that offer in the ad platform’s settings

If you sell to several distinct groups, split them into separate ad groups and write for each one. People click on ads that seem written for them, and a careful look at who your customers are is what makes that possible.

The visitor has seen your ad and chosen to click. The first thing they see on the page should confirm that the click was worth it.

If the ad promises A, the page should open with A, in the same words where possible. A visitor who has to check whether they have landed in the right place is already halfway back to Google. Google Ads also rates your landing page experience, meaning how relevant and useful the page is to people who click the ad, as one of the three parts of its Quality Score, so a mismatch costs you twice.

One landing page may receive traffic from several channels, so check that the opening message works for each of them.

Is there enough reason for the visitor to get in touch now?

If the page does not make the offer interesting enough, people put the decision off or look at a competitor. Show that you understand their problem, explain how you solve it, and say what happens after they get in touch. The more clearly the page answers the question that brought them there, the more likely they are to take the next step.

Every bit of effort you ask for costs you enquiries. Remove anything you do not strictly need:

• Offer one clear way to get in touch instead of several competing for attention
• Word the contact step so that it feels small: “Get a quote” asks less of the visitor than “Start your project”
• Say plainly that there is no commitment
• Cut the form fields you do not use

Let the browser do the typing. Browsers can fill in a visitor’s name, email address, phone number and postcode for them, provided each field carries the right autocomplete value (such as name, email, tel and postal-code). When a booking or an enquiry would otherwise mean a lot of typing, this takes most of the effort away. It is a small job for your developer and makes the biggest difference on mobile.

Fewer fields is not always better. The advice to cut every form to three fields is common, but what matters is how hard the form feels, not how many fields it has. A longer form split into steps, where the first step is an easy question with nothing sensitive in it (company size, say, or what the visitor needs help with), makes it easier to start.

People who have started a form generally want to finish it. And if you remove the fields you need to qualify a lead, your sales team ends up with enquiries they can do nothing with (more on that in the next section).

Smaller details that make a form easier to complete:

• Labels above the fields, not grey placeholder text that disappears as soon as the visitor starts typing
• A numeric keypad on mobile for phone numbers
• Error messages next to the field as the visitor fills it in, not only after they press send

Adapt these to your own business. For campaigns, build the page so that it can be adjusted quickly to each campaign’s audience and offer.

Some leads are worth far more than others, so build everything around your ideal customer.

Who you target decides which leads you get. Aim the advertising at the customers who suit you, write the ad for them and build the landing page for them. One or two qualifying questions in the form then help your sales team see which enquiries to call first.

Get this right and a larger share of your enquiries come from companies that go on to buy and that fit your business.

If poor-quality leads are a problem, offline conversion tracking lets Google Ads learn which enquiries turned into sales, so that it can bid for more of those.

As a rule of thumb, one for each combination of offer and audience you want to reach. A business that sells one core service to one type of customer may need only a handful; one with a broad range or several distinct audiences will need more.

• Start from your strategy. Build pages for the offers and audiences you actually advertise to or want to rank for, not for every possible variation.
• Separate the audiences. If a finance director and an operations manager buy the same service for different reasons, give each a page that speaks to their reason.
• Give each page one job. Every landing page needs one purpose and one clear call to action.

Landing pages are central to SEO. Competition for most commercial searches is tough, and to rank for a search term you generally need a page built for exactly that term.

If you want to appear for a service in a particular city, you need a page about that service in that city. Someone who has searched for exactly that, and finds you, is not far from getting in touch.

Paid search works the same way, yet far too much paid traffic is still sent to a generic home page.

• Build SEO landing pages for the search terms that have real search volume. Optimise each one for its terms, and set it up so that you can test versions to raise the conversion rate.
• Make those pages good enough that you want to send paid traffic to them.
• If you run Google Ads, send that traffic to the same pages your SEO targets wherever the search terms match.
• For paid social, use a matching SEO landing page where one exists. Where none does, build a campaign page, for example for a short-term offer.

For the page itself, our guide to on-page SEO covers titles, headings, copy and internal links.

You raise the conversion rate (the share of visitors who become a lead) mainly through trust, clear calls to action and a fast page that works as well on a phone as on a desktop. The sections above set out the overall approach; the ones below are the specific changes we would make first.

Praise from customers is the one kind of boasting people believe. Call yourself the best and nobody believes it. When review after review says you are the best supplier they have worked with, it carries weight.

Put reviews, testimonials or client logos close to the call to action, where the visitor is making up their mind. Use real names and companies where you have permission; an anonymous quote is easy to dismiss.

A call to action (CTA) is the button that asks the visitor to act. It should say plainly what happens when they press it, and suit the offer.

• Make the main button stand out. If every button on the page is equally loud, none of them is. Give the action you want a distinct colour and clear wording, and keep secondary links quieter.
• Choose the action to fit the campaign. Not every page needs the same one. Let the campaign decide whether the button asks for a call, a quote or a question, but keep to one action per campaign page.

Do not spend long debating which colour converts best; what matters is the contrast with the rest of the page. We once worked with a company whose brand colour was orange. Orange was already everywhere on the site, so it could not make the important buttons stand out. We used orange for navigation such as “Read more” and green for every contact button.

Visitors should recognise the page as the one the ad promised. Carry the same wording, the same offer and the same visual style from the ad to the page, so that there is no moment of doubt after the click.

A page that looks like your company rather than a generic template is also easier to remember. Even when a visit does not produce a lead straight away, it can leave a better impression of your brand for the next time they search.

Stock photos, free or paid, rarely work as well as your own. Visitors have often seen them elsewhere, and they say nothing about you.

Photos of your team, your premises and your work show who the visitor will be dealing with. Our view is that they help later in the sales process too: prospects who have seen your faces on the website feel they already know you by the time you speak.

Mobile still gets surprisingly little attention, even at companies where more than half the traffic comes from phones. Check that:

• The design works as well on a phone, especially on the pages that matter most
• Forms are as easy to fill in with a thumb as with a keyboard
• Visitors can find what they need through the mobile navigation
• The page loads quickly on mobile data, not only on Wi-Fi

Before you send traffic to a new page, open it on your own phone, on mobile data, and try to get in touch.

Fast pages and conversions go together: the longer a visitor has to wait, the fewer tend to convert.

Google measures how quickly a page responds with a metric called INP (Interaction to Next Paint): the time from a visitor clicking, tapping or typing to the page visibly reacting. Google Search Central advises keeping INP below 200 milliseconds.

On landing pages the usual culprits are heavy form scripts, chat widgets and third-party tracking tags. Remove what you do not need before you spend more money on traffic.

Speed also helps your SEO: Google says Core Web Vitals, INP among them, are used by its ranking systems.

Improving landing pages is a cycle: measure, find where visitors drop off, change one thing and measure again. Changing one thing at a time is what tells you which change made the difference.

You cannot tell which channels and pages work without measuring conversions (leads). Without that data you are guessing at what to change.

Every website needs conversion tracking, not only its landing pages. Our guide to Google Tag Manager shows how to set it up with Google Analytics 4.

The part that is specific to landing pages is the report. In GA4, open Reports, then Engagement, then Landing page. If it is missing from the menu, anyone with Editor access can add it back. The report lists the first page of each visit, so filter it to your landing pages and compare sessions with key events, which is what GA4 now calls conversions. That shows you, page by page, what share of visitors convert.

Consent Mode, now in its second version, is Google’s way of letting your tags adjust to the choice a visitor makes in your cookie banner. Google’s EU user consent policy covers visitors in the UK as well as the EEA and Switzerland, and requires consent for cookies where the law requires it and for ad personalisation. In the UK, the cookie rules sit in PECR and personal data falls under UK GDPR. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 now lets you set cookies used only to collect statistics for improving your own website without asking first, as long as you explain them and let visitors object. Advertising cookies are not covered, and nor is analytics data that is passed to your ad platforms.

Without the right setup you lose the data Google Ads needs to learn which clicks turn into business. Bidding has less to work from, and you risk losing conversion tracking and remarketing audiences.

So treat the cookie banner as part of your measurement, not a legal formality. For a landing page that receives paid traffic, check that:

• The cookie banner passes the visitor’s choice on to the Google tags
• Tag Assistant shows the choice reaching the tags both when the visitor accepts cookies and when they decline
• Enhanced conversions is switched on in Google Ads

Few technical settings have as direct an effect on how much of your ad spend you can account for.

An A/B test splits your traffic between the current page (A) and a challenger (B), typically half each, and you keep whichever version produces more leads.

Tools such as Optimizely and VWO make this straightforward. Most tests change the page in the visitor’s browser, so both versions share one URL. For a full redesign you can run a split-URL (redirect) test instead, which compares two separate addresses.

We would not start with testing. Most pages have obvious fixes to make first, and A/B testing is for a page that already works and that you want to make better. Its strength is that you move forward step by step and keep only the changes that have proved themselves.

Work out before you start how much traffic a test needs for the result to be reliable. Run tests on the pages with the most conversions, then carry the winning changes over to landing pages that get less traffic. A temporary increase in ad budget during a test gets you to a reliable answer sooner.

A heatmap shows where people click and how far down the page they scroll. Hotjar is one of several tools that provide them.

It shows whether your form, your call to action or a key message sits below the point where most visitors have already left. That makes heatmaps a good source of ideas for your next A/B test, and a useful brief for whoever designs the page.

You can build similar measurements in Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics 4, such as scroll depth, but a heatmap is quicker to read and easier to share.

The right tool depends on whether the page will stay live or only run for a campaign. Unbounce, Leadpages and Instapage are among the best-known tools for standalone campaign pages:

• Unbounce: a drag-and-drop editor with built-in A/B testing for trying out versions of a campaign page.
• Leadpages: integrations with email and other marketing tools, so you can get a page live quickly.
• Instapage: features such as heatmaps and A/B testing for improving the conversion rate.

These suit short-term campaigns where you want to test an offer quickly. For pages that need to rank and build your brand over time, we prefer them on your own website. Google has said its web search is fine with either subdomains or subfolders, so this is not about rankings as such. The reasons are practical: pages on your own site are easy to link to from the rest of it, share your design and tracking, and leave you with one system to keep up to date instead of two.

In Google Ads, the landing page is the address the ad sends the visitor to, known as the final URL. In Google Analytics 4, landing page means something else: the first page a visitor sees in a session, whether or not it was built as a landing page. That is why your home page or a blog post can show up as a landing page in the reports.

A campaign page should generally not have a menu, because every link away from the goal gives the visitor a way out. A good compromise is to keep your logo and your contact details as plain text in the footer. That shows who you are without giving the visitor a link away from the goal. SEO landing pages are the exception: they need normal navigation.

The length depends on how big the decision is. For a newsletter or a downloadable guide a short page is enough, because it takes little for the visitor to say yes. If the visitor is booking a meeting about a service worth tens of thousands of pounds, they first need answers on price, approach and results, and a longer page with testimonials and FAQs usually works better.

Not everything has to fit on the first screen either. Mobile visitors scroll, so place the button where they have enough information to want to act, and repeat it further down.

There is no single figure that applies to everyone. The conversion rate depends on the industry, the traffic source and how big the step is: a download generally converts better than a quote request. Do not compare a campaign page with the average for your whole website, which includes many visitors who were never there to buy. Compare the page with itself over time instead.

A landing page sits between your advertising and your conversion work, so the best help comes from someone who understands both how the traffic is bought and what happens once it arrives. Choose a partner who measures leads and sales, not just clicks and visitors. If you would like us to run your Google Ads and show you what to change on the pages they send traffic to, get in touch.

In our view, improving landing pages is badly underrated. The more traffic you have, the more it pays to get more out of the traffic you already have. Ask yourself: what is the easiest way to double sales? If you have plenty of visitors, doubling them is hard and expensive. Doubling the conversion rate of a decent website is hard too, but the pages your paid traffic lands on are usually the most direct place to start.

Start with the landing page that receives the most paid traffic today. That is where an improvement reaches the most visitors you are already paying for.

A free search audit shows where your ad traffic lands today and what to change first.