Someone searches for one specific thing, clicks your ad, and lands on a homepage listing eight services, a company history, and a photo of a truck. They have to work out which part of this applies to them.
Most of them do not bother. You paid for that click.
What a homepage is for
Your homepage serves several audiences at once. Someone who typed your business name. A returning customer looking for the phone number. A supplier. Someone who saw your van and wanted to check you exist.
It has to be broad, and that is correct. It just makes it the wrong destination for a visitor with one specific question and no patience.
What a landing page is
The page that answers the exact search that brought them, and nothing else.
If the ad says “walk in shower installation,” the page is about walk in shower installation. Not bathrooms generally. Not your full service list. That one job: what is involved, what it costs or how you price it, what happens next, and how to reach you.
The match between search, ad, and page is the whole mechanism. Break it anywhere and you pay for the click and lose the person.
What belongs on one
A heading that repeats the search. Someone who searched for a walk in shower should see those words immediately. This is not clever, and it is the single biggest factor in whether they stay.
One sentence on what you do and where. “Walk in showers installed across Bay and Walton counties, usually in three to five days.”
Proof. Photos of your actual work, not the manufacturer’s brochure. A review that mentions this specific job. Years in business, license, whatever your trade takes seriously.
What happens next. “Call and we will book a visit this week” or “Send three photos and we will give you a range by tomorrow.”
A way to act, twice. Near the top and again at the bottom. On a phone, the number should be one tap.
Answers to the two or three objections you always hear. How long it takes. How much mess. Whether you handle the permit. You know these because you answer them daily.
What does not belong
- Your full navigation. Every extra link is a way to leave.
- Your company history.
- A list of your other seven services.
- A carousel.
- Anything that requires scrolling past to find the point.
The page has one job. Everything that is not that job is a distraction you paid for.
You do not need thirty of them
The instinct is to build a page per keyword. Do not. Build one per service you advertise, which for most local businesses is between two and five.
Start with the one service you most want more of. Get it working. Then build the second.
The mobile version is the version
Most local search happens on a phone, and paid clicks skew even further that way. Design for the phone first and check it on one.
Specifically: the heading and the call button should be visible without scrolling. The number should be a tap, not something to copy. Forms should be short, with fields big enough for a thumb and text large enough that the phone does not zoom when someone taps in.
Measure the right thing
A landing page that gets fewer clicks to other pages is working. Time on page is nearly meaningless here, because someone who reads for eleven seconds and calls you is the best outcome available.
Measure calls and form submissions from that page, divided by the visits. That is the number. If it is under two percent, the page or the ad match is wrong. Five to ten percent is a good local landing page. Higher than that usually means the ad is very tightly targeted, which is a good problem.
Where they live on your site
Two schools of thought. Either the landing page is your ordinary service page, made sharper, or it is a separate page with the navigation removed.
For most small businesses the first is simpler and better. One good service page, used for both paid and organic traffic, is easier to maintain than two versions that drift apart. Strip it back, make it specific, and point the ads at it.
If you do build separate ad-only pages, make sure they are not accidentally competing with your service pages in search results, and keep the phone number the same on both.
This week
- Look at where your ads currently point. If any go to the homepage, that is the first fix.
- Take your best-selling service and write a page about only that.
- Put the search phrase in the heading.
- Add three photos of your own work and one review that mentions this job.
- Put the phone number at the top and the bottom, tappable.
- Load it on a phone and see whether you could call in one tap without scrolling.
