Domains, delivery and craft
What is Landing page?
Any page a visitor arrives on first, and in campaign terms a page built for one specific audience and one action. Its job is to continue the promise made by whatever brought the visitor there, which is why generic home pages convert campaign traffic badly.
Also called: campaign page · entry page
What makes one work
- A headline that repeats the promise of the ad or link that brought them
- One action, repeated, rather than several competing ones
- Proof placed next to the claim it supports, not in a separate section
- Objections answered before the form, not after it
- Fast enough that impatient traffic survives to read it
Where it crosses into doorway pages
A set of near-identical pages differing only by a swapped city name is a doorway page, and it is an explicit search policy violation. A landing page earns its place by containing something specific to its audience — evidence, terms, pricing, examples — not by templating a variable.
Test the traffic it actually gets
A page built for paid traffic frequently ranks for something unrelated, and the two audiences want different things. Check Search Console for which queries it actually earns impressions on before optimising it further.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. The 35 types of SEO, explained without the padding covers this properly — 6 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.