I finish a landing page for a service business and it is done. It looks good, it works on a phone, and it is ready.
And then it sits there. Nobody on the client's side can find the login for their domain, so the page has nowhere to live. On another build it is a tracking pixel nobody has the ID for, or the photos that were supposed to come in.
I'm sitting there with a finished page and no way to put it in front of anybody.
And it is my fault, because I asked for those things at the end of the build instead of at the start.
So what do I actually need from a client up front, so the page can go live the same week it is finished?
After building tens of landing pages and funnels this year, I ask for the same 8 things on every project before anything gets designed. If you run a service business and you are about to get a landing page made, this is the list to get together first.
Why the building is the fast part
A landing page is built out of things only the owner has. Whoever builds it can design the layout without you, but they cannot make up your prices, take photos of your van, or log into a domain account in your name.
So the slow part is the gap between the builder asking for something and somebody on your side finding it, and the later the question gets asked, the longer a finished page waits.
One, your offer, and why it has to be one service
The first thing is the one service the page is about.
It has to be one service because somebody landing on your page gives you a few seconds to show them it is about them, and if you do not, they leave. A lot of owners tell me they do everything, which is usually true, and a page about everything is very hard to write a headline for.
So stick to one service, one offer and one guarantee. The visitor has less room to get lost in the sauce and a better chance of picking up the phone and calling you. If you want one page covering several services, you are really thinking about a website rather than a landing page.
In practice, pick the service that brings in the most money and write down a starting price, how long a normal job takes, and what you guarantee, since the guarantee usually answers your customer's biggest worry. The copy on the page gets written around this.
Two, who the page is talking to
Whoever builds your page will write the copy, but only as well as you can describe your customer, and nobody else can do that part for you.
So write down four things:
- where your customers are
- what the problem sounds like in their own words
- what makes them hesitate before they call anybody
- how urgent it is for them when they are looking
These change the page a lot. Somebody whose boiler broke this morning wants your number straight away so they can call you now. Somebody thinking about replacing theirs next year wants to look around first, and maybe leave their details for later. It is the same business, and it is not the same page.
Keep the answers specific. "Homeowners aged 30 to 60" does not pack the same punch as the actual problem these people have and the actual reason they stall.
Three, your strong points, written backwards
The third thing is what makes you the best choice, and I want you to work this one backwards.
The usual version is a list of facts about yourself. Working since 1998, family run, fully certified. Some of those do serious work on a page, but you have to know why each one is there.
So start from the concerns you wrote down in number two, and for each one, name the thing about you that answers it.
- If they are anxious you will not turn up, you let them know a few hours in advance before you set off.
- If they are worried about the work being done properly, you have the certification or the guarantee.
- If they are uneasy about a stranger in their house, the same person does the whole job, and their face is on the page.
In practice, put the concerns in one column and what answers them in the other. If you have a fun fact about your business that you cannot match to any concern, it is usually fluff, and it can come off the page.
Those first three are about knowing your own offer and who it is for. The next five are things you hand over, and two of them, the photos and the domain, are where real builds get stuck the longest.
Four, where the people on this page come from
Every route people take to reach you wants a different page.
If they mainly find you by searching on Google, you might need a website with a dedicated page for each service rather than one landing page, because search needs somewhere to send people for the specific thing they typed in.
If your traffic comes from ads, a dedicated landing page is the right call, so the page matches the ad as closely as possible.
People sent by a referral probably trust you already, so they mainly need a straightforward way to get in touch.
Then there is the prep that stalls builds, the tracking pixels. These are small code snippets that ad platforms and analytics tools use to show where visitors came from and what they did. If you run your own ads, look up your pixel IDs now. If somebody else manages your ads, get in touch with them early and get those IDs, because this kind of back and forth is what drags projects way past their deadline.
Five, your reviews
Reviews are on the page to lower the risk of choosing you. The visitor has never met you and does not trust you yet, and a review from another customer is the closest thing they have to a friend recommending you.
Before the build starts, get the link to your Google reviews ready. If people message you to say you did a good job instead of leaving a review, screenshots of those messages work too.
If you are just starting and have none yet, I wrote a whole piece on what to put in that slot instead.
Six, real photos of you and your work
Photos are where a lot of the friction comes from when I build a site. Sometimes the owner hires a professional photographer and the page waits for the pictures. Other times the answer is to plop in some AI photos, which works for a first build, and I still strongly recommend your own.
Somebody is about to let you into their house or their business, so they want to see who is turning up. Stock photos do not tell them that, and they make the page look like every other page in your trade.
You do not need a professional for your first set, a phone is fine. Take photos of you doing the work, before and afters, your van, your tools and your team. Take them in daylight, some with the phone upright and some sideways, because the page needs both shapes for phones and for computers. You can enhance them with AI afterwards, and whoever builds your page will have a far easier time making it look original.
Seven, where the leads actually go
Everything on a landing page points at one action, a call, a message or the form. If the form sends to an email address nobody reads, the page did its job and you still lost the customer.
So decide before the build whether you want calls, WhatsApp messages or form submissions, which number and which inbox go on the page, and who answers them.
In practice this comes down to one phone number somebody picks up during working hours and one inbox somebody opens every day. You can also have an automatic reply go out when somebody fills in the form, so they know it arrived.
If you are building your own site, I also wrote a separate piece on making sure your form actually reaches you.
Eight, access to your domain and your accounts
This is the one I started with, and in my own work it has been the worst time waster of them all.
To put your page on your own domain, somebody needs access to wherever your domain's DNS is managed. DNS is the set of records that tells the internet where your domain points, and launching the page means adding a record or two there. Nine times out of ten that is where you bought the domain, like GoDaddy, Namecheap or domain.com. Sometimes an IT company set up your domain and email a long time ago, and it lives on their platform instead.
On my builds, people forget where their DNS is hosted, and that is by far the most common reason a job gets delayed. It is often a few minute job that gets dragged out to months, because nobody knows who handles the domain.
In practice, find out where your domain was bought and check that you can log in. If an old web person or an IT company set it up, find out who that was and make sure they can hand over access or make the change when the page is ready. If you cannot get in, say so at the start, because getting access back takes time. The same goes for your Google Business Profile and your ad accounts.
What to do with this
Before you talk to anybody about a build, check the one that takes longest to fix. Find out where your domain is managed and try logging in today. If you get in, the worst time waster on this list is already out of the way. If you cannot, you found out while nothing is waiting on it.