Forget web site principles when building a landing page!

How can anyone make such an audacious statement? 

Well let's look at the facts:

• Your web site presents your whole company, and as such is very broad in content.  It often includes things like, About Us, Our Services, Our Products, News, Our People, and Contact Us.  You get the point.



• Your web site often has 2nd or even 3rd tier navigation to direct people to the wide range of information that needs to be available across your company and its goods and services.



• Your web site will have different "calls to action", if any, depending on the page content.



• Your web site purpose will most likely try and cover: information dissemination, customer service, sales, lead generation, public relations, blogs etc.



• Due to the various audiences and purposes of a web site, ROI is hard to measure.



• Complex sites make testing a challenging activity.

The skills need to create successful web sites include not only sound SEO principles but graphic design ability, usability knowledge and experience, programming skills, content creation and the rest.

Now - let's look at the purpose and structure of a landing page:

• A landing page is where someone who has been searching in a search engine goes after they click on your Pay Per Click (PPC) ad.



• They want extremely deep and focused information, with little or no clutter.



• You paid to get them there so there is a strong "call to action".



• Navigation is limited to reduce choice and increase "action".



• Scrolling is limited or non existent.



• You must get an email address or phone number to be successful.



• You need to have a clear "exchange of value" for the contact details.



• Your key phrase selection and PPC ads are all directed at a defined and measurable outcome.



• ROI is easily tracked.



• Testing is simple.

So you see, land pages are narrow and focused, based on satisfying both the needs and wants of a web surfer and PPC ad "clicker", while also giving a positive ROI for an action requested on a landing page.

Web sites, often by necessity, must be general, company wide and yield less measurable and quantifiable results. 

Both a web site and a landing page have a valuable purpose, but the skills required to build them, their appearances and underlying purposes are very different.

see also