Do you need a website or a landing page?

I see business owners asking this online all the time. One of them put it like this:

"I'm really confused as to what I need, a full on website or a landing page? I really don't know the difference between the two in full but all i know is that i need LEADS."

So they go looking for an answer, and they get two opposite ones.

A business consultant, somebody like me who sells landing pages, tells them a landing page is the only thing they really need. Then a web developer comes along and says landing pages are useless, they do not work for service businesses at all, and everything should go on a proper website.

Both of them sound sure of themselves. So which one is it?

I build landing pages for service businesses, working under a white label partnership with a marketing agency that manages more than 120 client accounts, and the people who come to me do not all need the same thing. Some need a brand new landing page from scratch. Some need a landing page that works alongside the website they already have. Some are looking for a website. And some want a new design on their site and are worried they will lose their Google rankings if it is not done right.

After building pages for all of those, I sort them into 3 situations. By the end of this you will know which one you are in, what to build for it, and what to build first if you are starting from nothing.

What each one actually is

A landing page is one page with one job. Somebody arrives, they read one offer, and the only thing left to do is fill in the form or make the call.

A website is several pages with a menu. There is a home page, a page for every service, often a page for every area you work in, an about page, a contact page and so on.

The consultant and the developer are both answering a different question, because what actually decides it is where the person came from before they landed on your page.

Situation one, you send the people, so build a landing page

The first situation is when you are the one sending people to the page.

You run a Facebook or Google ad. Somebody recommends you and you text them a link. It is the link in your Instagram bio, a billboard, or a sticker on the side of your van.

What matters is that you sent them with a specific message, so they arrive with a specific intent. They know what they came for. If they clicked an ad about boiler repair, they want to see boiler repair, whether you are trustworthy, a starting price, and what the next step is to get their boiler fixed.

Google says the same thing in its own advice for advertisers. Their help page tells you to choose a landing page that closely matches your ad and keywords.

Google also has a rating it calls Quality Score, which is how relevant your ad and your page are to the person searching, and landing page experience is one of the three things that go into it.

So for this traffic, a page built around the one offer makes sense. The ad says boiler repair, the headline says boiler repair, and nothing on the page sends them off to read about bathroom fitting.

This does not mean you have to delete your menu everywhere. Google does not tell you to do that, and some pages do fine with one. As a general rule, a separate page for the service you are advertising beats sending the ad to your home page. If you can, run the new page against your current one before you decide it is better.

The catch with this situation is that it only covers people you send. The moment somebody finds you on their own, the rules change.

Situation two, Google sends the people, so build a website

The second situation is when people find you by searching.

Somebody types "blocked drain" and the name of their town into Google, and they have never heard of you. So how does Google decide which pages to show them?

Google explains this in its own documentation on how search works. The most basic signal that information is relevant is when the content contains the same keywords as the search.

That means a page about blocked drains can show up for blocked drains. But a single page, like a landing page, cannot be the best answer for a water heater replacement in one town and a blocked drain in the next town over at the same time. The words are not on it.

That is what a website is for. It is a set of pages with a menu and a structure, so you can have a page for each service and, where it makes sense, a page for each area. Every search gets a page that actually matches it, and you show up in results without paying for ads.

Be careful when you build those pages. If you copy the same page twenty times and just swap the town name, Google penalises it. Their spam policy calls it doorway abuse, which means pages made only to rank for similar searches that all funnel people to the same place. So each page has to actually be different: the jobs you have done in that area, the reviews from people who live there, what the work costs locally.

If most of your enquiries come from search, this is the right build. A page for every service you want to be found for, and a page for an area only when you have something real to put on it.

Situation three, you have both, so build the landing page next to the website

The third situation is when you have both kinds of traffic. As a business grows this is a pretty natural step. You have people finding you through search, and now you want to run ads as well.

So the question becomes, if I already have a website, where does the ad traffic go? Do I send it to the home page?

Here is how a roofing company in California called Cobex Construction does it. Their Facebook ad goes to a page on quote.cobexcg.com. It is one page, with no menu and five links on the whole thing. Their main website is a completely different story. It has separate pages for roof repair, roof replacement, inspections and storm damage, and pages for the cities they work in, like Roseville, Sacramento and Elk Grove.

The ad traffic gets one page with one job, and the search traffic gets a page for every search. It is the first two situations running side by side.

That "quote" at the start of the address is called a subdomain. It is a separate address that still sits under your own domain, so the landing page can look and work completely differently from the website without touching it.

This is what I do when somebody with an existing website comes to me for a landing page. Instead of building a new page into their site and possibly meddling with the rankings it already has, I build the landing page on its own subdomain and run the ads to that. They keep the website bringing in search traffic with a page for every service, and the ads get a page built only to convert.

A landing page can also live inside the website as its own page with the menu still there. That works too, as long as the page is about the one offer the ad was about.

So in practice, keep one website for search, and give each ad you are running its own page, either on a subdomain or inside the site.

That covers everybody who already has something. The last question is for the people who have nothing yet.

Starting from nothing, start with the landing page

If you have no page at all, which one do you build first?

Logically, a website looks like the better base, because it can do both jobs. A service page on a website can work as a landing page for an ad.

I would still recommend the opposite, simply because of speed. Start with a landing page for the main service you want to be known for, the one that brings in the most money.

It is one page, so it goes live a lot sooner, and landing pages usually cost less than websites. The day it is up, you have somewhere to send every ad, referral and social post, a link for your social media profiles, and a link for your Google Business Profile, the listing that shows up on Google Maps.

Then, as you learn which searches actually bring you work and you expand into more services, you flesh the landing page out into a full website one page at a time. It does not have to be one or the other, and you never build twenty pages nobody visits.

And if you do not have reviews yet to put on that first page, I wrote a whole piece on what to put there instead.

What to do with this

The owner asking that question at the top did not need to learn the difference first. They needed to know where their leads come from. So look at where your last handful of enquiries came from. If you sent them, from an ad, a referral or your socials, you need a landing page for that one offer. If they found you on Google, you need a page for each thing they searched. If it is a mix, you need both, with the landing page sitting next to the website rather than inside the home page.

If you have no enquiries yet because you have no page yet, build the landing page for your best service first and let it grow from there.