One of the things I’ve noticed over the years is how much digital marketers love coming up with terminology for things that are actually relatively straightforward. Whether it’s customer journeys, conversion funnels or various other marketing expressions, there’s a tendency to make relatively simple concepts sound considerably more complicated than they really are. One example that I come across particularly frequently is the term ‘landing page’, which seems to have taken on a life of its own, with some businesses apparently convinced that they need to create an entirely separate set of pages specifically for their marketing campaigns.
I’ve had conversations with clients who have perfectly good websites, containing detailed information about their products and services, but still believe they need to commission additional landing pages before they can start advertising on Google or Facebook. In some cases, they’ve been advised to create dozens of these pages, often containing almost exactly the same information that’s already available elsewhere on their website. Personally, I think this is frequently an unnecessary complication, and it generally comes down to a misunderstanding of what a landing page actually is.
What Exactly Is a Landing Page?
The simplest definition of a landing page is the page somebody arrives on after clicking a link. That link might appear in a Google advertisement, an email newsletter, a social media post or even Google’s organic search results. It doesn’t necessarily matter what the page looks like, how it was created or where it sits within your website. If somebody clicks a link and arrives on that page, it’s functioning as a landing page.
However, somewhere along the way, the marketing industry seems to have adopted a rather more specific interpretation of the term. Landing pages are often described as standalone pages, usually with minimal navigation, a prominent call to action and content designed to encourage visitors to complete one particular objective. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that approach, and in certain circumstances it can be extremely effective, but it isn’t the only way a landing page can work.
For example, imagine somebody searches Google for ‘accountants in Worcester’ and clicks an advertisement for a local accountancy firm. If that advertisement takes them to the firm’s existing accountancy services page, which contains relevant information and a straightforward way to make an enquiry, then that page is serving perfectly well as a landing page. There’s no particular reason why the business needs to create another page containing essentially the same information simply because somebody has decided that advertising campaigns need dedicated landing pages.
Shouldn’t Your Existing Pages Already Be Optimised?
This is probably my biggest argument against creating unnecessary landing pages. If your website has been designed and optimised properly in the first place, most of its important pages should already be capable of converting visitors into customers.
Think about what a good SEO strategy involves. You identify the products and services people are searching for, create relevant pages explaining those products or services, ensure the content answers potential customers’ questions and provide clear opportunities for visitors to get in touch or make a purchase. Ideally, those pages should also load quickly, work properly on mobile devices and be easy to navigate.
Now compare that with the advice typically given about creating effective landing pages. They should contain relevant content, match the visitor’s expectations, load quickly and make it straightforward to complete a particular action.
There’s an enormous amount of overlap, isn’t there?
If you’ve already spent time creating a properly optimised page targeting a particular service, I’d suggest that your first consideration should be whether you can use that page for your advertising campaign. If it contains everything the visitor needs, why create another one?
The Problem with Having Too Many Landing Pages
One of the biggest disadvantages of creating separate landing pages for every marketing activity is that you can quickly end up with numerous versions of essentially the same content.
Let’s say you’re running an ecommerce website selling office furniture. You’ve already got a category page dedicated to office chairs, containing product information, prices and links to individual products. However, somebody decides that your Google Ads campaign needs a dedicated office chairs landing page, so you create another page containing much of the same information.
A few months later, you launch a Facebook campaign and decide that needs another landing page. You might then create additional versions for an email campaign, a seasonal promotion and various other marketing activities.
Before long, you’ve got half a dozen pages covering the same subject, all of which need maintaining whenever your products, prices or services change. There’s also the potential for confusing customers who encounter different versions of what appears to be the same page.
From an SEO perspective, creating multiple similar pages can also introduce unnecessary complications. Google doesn’t automatically penalise websites for having duplicate content, but it may struggle to determine which version should appear in search results, and your internal links and external backlinks could end up pointing to several different URLs rather than one established page.
In more extreme cases, creating large numbers of very similar pages purely to target slight variations of search queries can also raise concerns about doorway pages, something Google has been warning against for years.
When Does a Dedicated Landing Page Make Sense?
Of course, I’m not suggesting that dedicated landing pages are always unnecessary. There are plenty of circumstances where creating a separate page is entirely justified, particularly when you’re running a campaign with a specific offer or objective that isn’t adequately covered by your existing website.
For example, imagine you’re promoting a limited-time discount, launching a new product or encouraging people to register for an event. In those situations, a dedicated page containing information about the promotion, along with a prominent call to action, might be considerably more effective than directing visitors to a general product or service page.
Similarly, there can be advantages to creating specially designed pages for certain paid advertising campaigns, particularly if you want to test different messages, layouts or forms without making permanent changes to your main website.
However, I’d argue that these decisions should be driven by an actual requirement, rather than an assumption that every campaign automatically needs its own landing page.
What Does Google Actually Want?
Interestingly, Google’s own guidance on landing page experience doesn’t suggest that advertisers need to create separate pages for every campaign. Instead, Google places emphasis on the relevance and usefulness of the destination page, along with factors such as navigation, transparency and how closely the content matches what somebody expected when they clicked the advertisement.
You can read more about this in Google’s explanation of landing pages.
If somebody searches for a particular service, clicks your advertisement and arrives on a page that clearly explains that service and makes it easy to enquire, you’ve probably satisfied most of the important requirements. Whether that page was specifically created for the campaign or has been part of your website for five years is largely irrelevant.
Keep Things Simple
Personally, I think businesses would be better off concentrating on improving their existing websites rather than continually creating new pages for every marketing campaign. If an important product or service page isn’t capable of converting visitors, perhaps the solution is to improve that page rather than build another version of it.
That way, improvements benefit visitors arriving through SEO, paid advertising, social media and any other marketing channels you’re using, rather than being restricted to one particular campaign.
By all means, create dedicated landing pages when there’s a genuine reason to do so, but don’t assume they’re an essential requirement for every advertising campaign.
Ultimately, a landing page isn’t some special type of webpage that needs to be created by a marketing specialist. It’s simply the page somebody lands on, and if your website is doing its job properly, there’s a good chance you’ve already got plenty of them.