What’s the difference between a Home Page and a Landing Page?

Many people ask me…. what’s the difference between a Home Page and a Landing page?

It’s important to know how to design pages that get leads. Home pages have different goals than your landing pages. Every page on your website needs to have a strategy, quantifiable goals and a very specific business impact if you want your site to get found and drive leads for your company. The website needs to tell a story; the beginning, the middle and the end. Every page has a role in the buyer’s journey. The Awareness stage, the Consideration stage, and the Decision-making stage. The home page tells the beginning of the story, the landing page finishes the story.

What is the role of the Home Page?

The home page of any website is to position your brand with strong integration into the shopping experience. Positioning and posturing is the order of the day. People make judgments when they arrive at your home page. You have 10 seconds or less to answer questions; what do you do? how can you help them? Do you understand their challenges? Do you have solutions? Have you helped people like them? How are you different than your competitor?

Your home page needs to be about your prospects, NOT about you.

The home page goal is to disrupt their status quo, emotionally connect with them, and direct them to convert with educational content or move directly through your site to buy or learn more. Usually, the home page is for the buyer in the Awareness stage, but not always. It tells the overall story.

The Home Page Role is Positioning and Posturing

The build.com home page positions for customer service by providing live chat or a real person to speak with over the phone. The navigation spells out what this company sells and to whom. Then toward the bottom of the top of the fold and depending on what type of company you are, determines the direction or action you should take under the 4 areas of…Idea builder helps you check out curated favorites lists or create your own. Buildologists can get advice on specific products. DIY’ers can get build tips and how-to information. HomeAdvisor helps you find a pro in your area.

What is the role of the Landing Page?

The Landing Page is the power location on the site where robust information should be present. Imagery is elevated to present the product in the best light. The landing page has a major goal and a minor goal.

The major goal of the landing page is to turn visitors into leads. The landing page has to be highly effective in taking them through the decision making stage of the buying process. It’s the end of the story. Design the landing page with the conversion in mind.

The minor goal of the landing page is related to the search. You’ll want to pay special attention to the SEO of your landing pages. You’ll want these pages to be highly optimized.

Best Landing Pages

The best landing pages do not have navigation to the other pages of your website. This is a distraction.

Landing Pages that convert have the following 9 ingredients:

Your Unique Selling Proposition.
A Video increase conversions by 144%. If you don’t have a video, include an Image. Pictures of people sell.
3-7 Benefits (not Features)
An example of context of use
1 Enticing Form. Notice this form is short. Requesting only information absolutely necessary for nurturing leads.
1-3 Trust Elements. Memberships, testimonials, customer logos.
1 Call-To-Action – button – “Valuation & Offer Estimate”. Yes, only 1 course of action. Provide a phone number and an email so they can ask questions and your company can lead them through the process.
A Confirmation or Thank-You Page. It’s important! A thank you page is a separate page. The reason is for having a separate thank you page, rather than a message that displays on the same page, is for better conversion tracking. More importantly, if you’re not using the landing page to get your visitor to connect with your online community, signup for your newsletter, or signup to attend a workshop, you’re simply leaving money on the table. It’s another opportunity to engage or sell.
A/B Testing. A/B testing is another topic altogether. Put simply, it is a method of changing one thing at a time to seek higher conversion rates of your call-to-action.

One last thing to say about landing pages. A landing page is about one product and one product only.

Key Take-away: Take considerable time and effort on your landing pages. Conversion matters. The more they convert, the higher they will rank. Make sure you take a different approach to the different types of pages on your site.

The landing page is usually used from social media or most often from Pay-per-click marketing campaigns (google AdWords, Facebook ad, Bing ads)