What is the difference between a landing page and a website?
Many people are confused about the term “Landing Page”. Some think that a landing page is a page that is used for marketing purpose or a paid campaign. This is partially true.
In a simple language, a landing page is any page on your website which appears after someone clicks on your link anywhere on the internet – your link could be listed in Search Engine results or a blog or social media post.
Any page that directs the user for the first time on your website in a particular user session is called a landing page.
Then what is a website?
There are two types of websites.
- Single page website – a website that has only one page which contains all the information
- Multi-page website – a website that has more than 1 page interlinked using navigation links
Any page on your website can be called as a landing page, assuming that the user entered in your website using that page. The term landing page is restricted to a particular session of the user, whereas a website is a set of related web pages located under a single domain name.
In marketing campaigns, many advertisers develop a separate landing page apart from the website. Many of them don’t even develop the website, they develop the landing page and start the marketing campaigns.
In my opinion, you must always develop the complete website and then start using the landing page for the ads. A website having only one product or service can be an exception to this.
Imagine your website as a shop which sells many products, and your landing page is one of the banners displayed inside the shop. A user checks your banner(landing page) about a particular model of a bike, and he would also like to check what are the other models that you sell, but you haven’t kept those models on display(your website), so he decides to go to another shop to check those models(user goes to another website). You lose the interest of the customer in your shop(website) here.
Every page on your website acts as a landing page sooner or later. Hence, the pages should be marketing ready.
What are the good qualities of the landing pages?
- Develop SEO friendly pages – follow most of the guidelines of Search Engines. It helps in generating organic traffic to the website.
- Improve UX – Make sure the information is easily accessible and the user is comfortable in interacting with the website. Too many popups, repeated popups, overlapping content, etc. can result in a higher bounce rate.
- The page must load as fast as it can – Don’t put heavy images on the website or add lazy loading to make the pages appear faster. Also, combine CSS and JS code in a single file wherever possible. This reduces the number of requests sent to the server and improves the response time.
- The page content must be relevant to the users’ queries and the page should also suggest what else the users can check – e.g. On the bike-related page, you can also display what other models a user can check or the accessories suitable for that particular model. This reduces your bounce rate and helps in more conversions/sales.
- Use proper Call-To-Actions(CTAs)– CTAs should be mentioned on the pages properly, it should be easily accessible and it should be relevant to the page.
- Add social proof/reasons-to-believe – Addition of users’ reviews/testimonials can increase the chances of generating more conversions.