How to Create a Landing Page: Our Complete Guide

Q: What is required for a landing page?

Thankfully, you don't need a whole lot of moving parts to create a landing page as it's essentially a webpage that's been stripped down to a few elements in order to get the user to convert. Essentially, all you need for a landing page is a heading, a CTA, images, and a few bits of text (known as the ad copy).

Any digital marketer worth their salt knows about the importance of having a landing page. It’s one of the best ways to generate more leads and conversions when running a business. However, knowing how to create a landing page is an entirely different matter altogether.

Of course, if you wish to succeed at online marketing, then it’s imperative to know how to create a successful landing page that will drive more leads to either your clients or your own business. It’s an essential asset to have in the competitive field of internet marketing.

But hold the phone: why should you even care about what we have to say on the matter? Well, as a Google Ads agency, we have created more landing pages than we can even care to remember.

So, you could say that we know a thing or two.

But let’s cut the chit chat and get right down to it: if you wish to know how to create a good landing page that will help you achieve your marketing goals, read our guide down below.

What Is a Landing Page?

However, before we can show you how to build a landing page, we first need to answer the question: “what is a landing page?” After all, there’s no point in teaching you how to build one if you have no idea what it is!

Of course, if you’re already familiar with the concept of a landing page, the general theory behind its uses, etc., feel free to skip this part and go directly to the sections where we explain how to create landing pages.

So, what is a landing page?

A landing page is a stripped-down webpage that’s been designed solely to be part of an advertising campaign, and so it’s where users “land” after clicking on an ad or a link. Landing pages are very different from regular pages, in that they lack several features that you would find on a regular webpage.

For example, landing pages generally lack navigation and often don’t have any links; they usually have more CTAs than a regular page; they often have much less text and more visuals; and they are generally removed from the main website (in fact, they are sometimes hosted on a completely different domain!)

Finally, landing pages are temporary, and only exist for the duration of the ad campaign. Once the campaign is over, the landing page is generally removed.

When Should You Use a Landing Page?

As we have seen above, a landing page is a powerful marketing tool that boosts conversions thanks to its direct messaging and streamlined design. In fact, landing pages are so powerful that having anywhere between 10-15 landing pages boosts conversions by around 55%, according to research conducted by HubSpot.

However, while research shows that the more landing pages you employ, the higher your resultant conversion rate will be, you really shouldn’t be creating landing pages like your life depends on it.

Firstly, a landing page is only one tool out of many that constitute the digital marketing’s toolkit. Focusing too much on making landing pages inevitably means that you’re taking away time, energy, and money from other tools that can help you in having a holistic marketing strategy.

Secondly, not every marketing strategy hinges on the use of landing pages! A case in point is that while landing pages are extremely useful for paid ad campaigns, they’re hardly necessary for organic strategies, like SEO (search engine optimization) and SMO (social media optimization).

Lastly, landing pages are only useful for marketing a particular service, product, or offer from the whole gamut of your services. In other words, a landing page is only useful insofar as you’re marketing only one aspect of your business, and not your business as a whole. For example, a landing page is more useful for advertising a Black Friday sale on your products rather than your products in general.

How Much Does it Cost to Create a Landing Page?

It’s only natural to wonder about the costs that you have to incur when doing any digital marketing, and the cost of a landing page is definitely one to consider, as they’re not particularly cheap.

While the cost of a landing page will differ depending on several factors, you can consider that a landing page will cost you anywhere from $100 to $5000. The different on a number of variables:

if you’re contracting a professional agency to create a landing page with many moving parts and fancy designs, then you’re looking at a cost of anywhere between $1500 – $5000.
if you’re hiring a freelancer to create the page for you, then you could expect to spend between $50 – $300, depending on the freelancer’s rate.
if you decide to do the landing page yourself, then you could spend anywhere from $30 – $350, depending on the tools you use.

Therefore, another reason why you shouldn’t just be creating landing pages like there’s no internet tomorrow is because they’re not actually cheap to make. Each landing page could set you back anywhere from a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand dollars, so use them wisely!

Of course, you could always make the landing page for free… but don’t expect anything amazing as a result!

How Long Does It Take To Create a Landing Page?

While time is money, time is also, well, time.

So, if you’ve decided to cut down the costs as much as possible and instead invest your own time into building landing pages, then you have to be prepared to spend quite some time.

Of course, this is another of those “it depends” questions, as it really does: it depends on what platform or landing page maker you’re using, your level of skill with creating landing pages, and the complexity of the landing page you’re aiming for.

If you’re creating a simple landing page, for instance, it might only take you an hour or two, especially if you’re using a landing page template.

However, if you’re customizing the whole process and making a complex landing page, then this could easily take you a few days, or even a week.

If, instead, you hire a Google Ads agency like us, then the question of “how long does it take to build a landing page?” will be very different as we have the experience, expertise, and necessary tools to make creating a landing page smooth as can be.

Looking to hire a Google Ads specialist instead? Our team of Google Ads experts can handle your campaigns for you.

How to Set Up a Landing Page

You can’t learn how to do a landing page if you don’t first learn what the essential part of a landing page are. It’s a bit like becoming a mechanic and not knowing what the parts of an engine are. So, the same way that a car has a carburetor, pistons, spark plugs, etc., a landing page will need to have CTAs, a hero image, ad copy, and so on.

At the same time, we’re also going to over the steps that you need to follow in order to create your landing page, so you can learn what characteristics are essential for a landing page, as well as how to create one from scratch.

1. What’s Your Goal?

The first step to creating a landing page is defining what your marketing goals are with the landing page. After all, it’s useless to create a landing page if you have no idea what you’re using it for. In other words: are you using to landing page to get more buyers? To increase your mailing list?

Whatever your intention, it’s important to define it from the start and use it as guiding principle for your landing page. Not only will it guarantee that you remain consistent throughout the landing page creation process, but it also helps you determine what landing page metrics you need to track.

2. Craft Your Copy

While it’s often tempting to simply rush and go ahead and design your landing page, but we often find that having the meat and bones of the landing page ready beforehand will make this process much, much easier.

Moreover, according to Unbounce, the copy is twice as important as the design when it comes to conversion rates. In fact, having easy-to-read copy, clear headlines, and as little text as necessary guarantees a higher conversion rate. In other words: more like a social media post than a doctoral thesis.

3. Create Your CTA

The CTA (call to action) is basically almost the whole point of the landing page. It’s the thing that drives visitors to do what you want them to do on your landing page. This could be a button that takes visitors make a purchase or a form that collects their contact details. The kind of CTA you use depends on the goal of your landing page.

No matter what your CTA is, you need to make sure your CTA is as convincing as possible. And this doesn’t just mean making the button as shiny as possible.

An ideal CTA should be simple, prominent, and direct. For example, if you’re offering a discount on Google Ads courses, a good CTA to use would be something like, “CLAIM YOUR DISCOUNT NOW!”, rather something generic like “FIND OUT MORE!”

4. Bring Your Images to Life

Can you really have a landing page without any images? Of course not. In fact, it’s a bad idea to have any content without images due to the fact that there are so many reasons to have images with your content.

In fact, content with images gains 94% more views that continue without; moreover, images makes content more engaging, so it’s easier to capture attentions that way; and finally, according to research, 90% of information sent to the brain is visual.

These are great reasons to include images in your landing page.

5. Unify Everything With Your Landing Page Design

Now that you have all of your content ready, it’s time to put it all together into a beautiful landing page design. This part is often made easier by using landing page builders and templates. If you’re interested in what the best landing page templates out there are, we have an article that might help you out!

You can also take a look at a few landing page examples to gain a better understanding of what a high-converting landing page should look like!

Be sure that you don’t rush through this stage either as while the content (a.k.a. the copy, images, and CTAs) tends to be the most important aspect of a landing page, having a jumbled mess of a landing page won’t do you any favors. So, make sure that your design is neat, professional, and doesn’t overwhelm the user.

6. Track Your Landing Page

What’s the point of having a landing page if you have no idea how it’s performing? Tracking performance is an essential aspect of marketing and one of the most important skills to have!

By tracking the performance of your landing page, not only can you understand how well it is performing, and so the kind of returns that you can expect to receive from it, but you can also check how you can improve its performance or whether any changes you’ve made to it are having any effects.

In short: make sure that your landing page is connected to your analytics tools of choice, and regularly monitor how it’s performing!

7. Publish the Finished Product

Now that you have everything done, you’re finally ready to hit that “PUBLISH” button and show your well-crafted landing page to the world!

However, even this step requires a great degree of care! It’s very bad practice to publish the final product without taking advantage of the preview functionality on your landing page platform of choice. While it might look great on the editor, there might be aspects of your landing page that are actually awful once published!

Therefore, it’s wise to take the time to review how your finished landing page will look once it’s published.

8. Advertise Your Landing Page

It’s great that you finally have your landing up and running! But what’s the point of having it live if nobody’s going to find it? That’s why you have to integrate in your general digital marketing strategy.

Depending on the goals and strategy of the landing page, you can market it in a variety of ways. For example, if you decided to create an SEO landing page, then it’s natural to use SEO tactics to boost its visibility.

However, it’s mostly the case that landing pages are used as part of paid advertising strategies. Therefore, when you’re managing and creating paid ads, it’s best to send users to your landing page when they click on your advert!

9. Test & Optimize

It’s not enough to simply make sure that your landing page can be discovered by potential customers by integrating it into your general online marketing strategy: you need to treat it in the same way you would treat any other aspect of your marketing.

In other words, you need to optimize your landing page just as you would optimize your paid ads or your regular webpages!

By optimizing your landing page, you will be tweaking elements of it in order to get users to convert more easily. For example, you can reword the headline slightly in order to make the offer more enticing, or else add a greater sense of urgency to the CTAs.

Looking to hire a Google Ads specialist instead? Our team of Google Ads experts can handle your campaigns for you.

How to Create a Converting Landing Page: Our Expert Tips

Naturally, we cannot teach you how to create a perfect landing page (because nothing is perfect!), but we can teach you what you need to keep in mind when creating landing pages.

By keeping our list of dos and don’ts in mind, you can rest assured that any landing page you create will leave your clients astounded, and your customers coming for more.

But before we get into the meat of this section, it’s also a good idea to look at the best landing pages as a way of getting inspiration of how you should craft your own landing page. That way you’ll be learning from the best to beat the best. 😉

Now with that out of the way, let’s get into these landing page best practices.

1. Put Your Value Proposition In Your Headline

The first thing that a visitor to your landing page will see is your headline. And since attention spans are short (an average of 8.25 seconds, apparently), you need to hook your user right from the get-go.

To do that, you need to get right to the point of your landing page from the beginning by letting your user know what they can gain from converting. And so, you need to stick your offer in the headline, which is the first thing that users will encounter.

2. Craft Your Copy

3. Make Sure Your Copy Is Persuasive

Not only does your copy need to be short and sweet, but it also needs to convince the user of whatever it is you’re offering or selling them.

Learning how to write the best copy you possibly can is a whole other can of worms which we won’t go into here, but there are a few pointers that we can give you here: for example, it’s always a good idea to address a user directly, which helps with building a connection.

Moreover, one of the best pieces of the advice we can give you is to make your offer the solution to a problem. So, for example, if you’re selling Google Ads services, you can highlight how costly PPC strategies are, and how your services will both cut costs as well as boost their ROI.

4. Place Your CTA Above the Fold

The CTA is the main thing that you want your users to do when arriving to your landing page: so why would you want to bury it at the bottom of your page? It’s bad practice!

Therefore, no matter if your CTA is a button or a form, and no matter if you use multiple CTAs, make sure that at least one of them is immediately visible once a user lands on your page.

And by the way, in case you were wondering, “above the fold” means that it’s already in view without having to scroll downwards.

5. Add a Striking CTA

As we have already said above, your CTA needs to convince users as much as possible, and this is done by making your CTA as prominent as possible.

There are many ways to accomplish this. For example, having a CTA with a color that contrasts starkly from the rest of the page, or by having a significantly large CTA button.

Other actions you could take include giving your CTA button plenty of breathing room, keeping it as short as necessary, and putting a strong action verb on your CTA.

6. Make Your Offer Attractive & Relevant

Having an attractive offer as part of your landing page is basically the best way to guarantee conversions. However, your offer needs to be relevant to your company.

So, if your company sells marketing services, for example, it would be much more pertinent to offer an ebook about an aspect of marketing, rather than a free voucher for T-shirts with marketing slogans.

All in all, it’s extremely important to remain consistent throughout your landing page, as otherwise you will be confusing the user, and that distracts from your ultimate goal: getting them to convert.

7. Don’t Pester the User For Too Much Info

Another drawback of people having generally short attention spans is that they’re also extremely impatient. In fact, a recent study discovered that people are becoming more and more impatient due to technology and its promise of instant results.

Therefore, as a marketer, your job is also to make everything as quick as possible for your user in order for them not to get frustrated, impatient, or even disheartened when trying to fill out the form on your landing page, for example.

So, if your CTA is a form that users have to fill, restrict it to only a handful of necessary fields, like their email address and name, for example.

8. Navigation? Not For Me!

Remember what we’ve been saying: a landing page exists only to get a visitor to perform a desired action, and so they need to be as streamlined as possible in order to guarantee that a user will do nothing but click the CTA button or fill out your form.

(Of course, this is excluding the dreaded option of them just bouncing from your landing page, God forbid!)

Therefore, your landing page should be stripped of any distracting elements that could prevent a user from performing the desired action. In other words, all navigation links must go!

9. Responsive to All Devices

As time goes by, more and more people are accessing the internet on their phone. In fact, according to Techjury, mobile makes up for 49.78% of all web visits, while desktop accounts for the remaining 50.22%. However, 60.66% of traffic is from mobile—37.08% is from desktop and 2.26% is from tablets.

In other words, you need to make sure that your landing pages are responsive to all sorts of mobile devices, whether that’s iPhone, Android, etc., as well as tablets. That way, you won’t be losing out on any opportunities for conversions, especially since so many people depend on their phone to use the internet.

10. Say Thank You!

Having manners isn’t just essential for social reasons: it’s also necessary for marketing reasons. And there are quite a few reasons why you ought to implement a thank-you page after your user has performed the desired action.

Firstly, it acknowledges the user’s action and thanks them for it, which could go a long way in converting a visitor to a more permanent customer.

Furthermore, using a thank-you page could be the perfect opportunity to get the users interested in other products by linking out to them on the thank-you page.

Looking to hire a Google Ads specialist instead? Our team of Google Ads experts can handle your campaigns for you.

How to Make a Landing Page for Paid Advertising

As we have already said above, a landing page is most often used as part of a paid advertising campaign. So, other than knowing how to create a landing page, and what the best practices for creating a landing page are, it’s also good to bear in mind the paid ads platform you’re creating the landing page for.

In order words, building a landing page for Google Ads is different to building one that’s meant to go on Facebook Ads, for example. There are more considerations to make when creating a landing for Google Ads than other platforms, such as Google Ads Quality Score.

Let us take a look at some best practices for these paid ad platforms:

How to Create a Landing Page for Google Ads

The first, and almost most important, element of creating a landing page for Google Ads is making sure that your landing page is super specific. It’s a common PPC sin that marketers lead users to their website homepage.

This loses both the perfect opportunity to force a conversion from a visitor, as well as risking having them leave because they didn’t find what they’re looking for! And when visitors leave your landing page, that tells Google that your page experience isn’t up-to-par, thus affecting your Ad Rank.

Your landing page experience can also take a hit if your landing page hasn’t been optimized for conversions. In other words, if your landing page has too much clutter, too much copy, or even loads way too slowly, your page experience will take a hit, and so will your conversions.

Finally, always make sure to deliver relevant landing pages to the ad you’re displaying. If your ad isn’t relevant to what the user wants, then your ad relevance will also take a hit. If both your ad relevance and your landing page experience are low, your ad’s Quality Score will also be low.

How to Create a Landing Page on Facebook

When it comes to Facebook Ads, there are a number of considerations to keep in mind. These are largely rules imposed by Facebook in order to create a better experience for its users. Firstly, just as we saw with Google Ads, your landing page has to match your Facebook Ad in order to gain a good relevance score.

At the same time, your landing page has to provide a good user experience, or else Facebook will shut down your ads. So, stay away from black-hat tactics like redirecting users to a different URL or forcing a download as soon as they click on the ad. On the other hand, a good user experience entails that your landing page works.

It might sound obvious, but sending users to a broken URL or a 404 page isn’t ideal, and Facebook may also shut down your ad for that. Therefore, make sure that your server can keep up with a sizable uptick in traffic.

There are types of landing pages that require approval from Facebook in order to be able to publish your ad. For example, ads that are about weight loss, dating services, or alcohol would require approval. On the other hand, some ads are required to align with local and federal laws before approval.

These would include ads that are about gambling, credit cards, elections, and so on. Finally, there are some prohibitions in place for certain kinds of content, including deceptive, misleading, or false claims; anything that has to do with tobacco or drugs; or even the promotion of a negative self-image.

How to Create a Landing Page on Instagram

With Instagram Ads, on the other hand, you can take into consideration the same parameters as the ones for Facebook Ads—they are owned by the same company after all. However, due to the unique nature of Instagram, there are some separate considerations that you need to make when it comes to creating a landing page for Instagram.

Most importantly, it’s best to bear in mind that Instagram is largely a mobile-phone-based social media platform, so most of its users will be on their phones. Therefore, it’s best to make sure that your landing page is both mobile responsive as well as optimized for mobile use.

On the same note, it’s best to reduce scrolling as much as possible as this would definitely detract from the overall user experience. Which user is going to convert if they need to scroll through a long page of winding ad copy? Hardly anyone!

And finally, since most of your visitors from Instagram will be using their phones, it’s best to settle for a minimalist design that doesn’t clutter the landing page too much and causes an eyesore for the user. While this is a good rule of thumb for any landing page you make, it’s doubly important when creating landing pages for mobile users.

FAQs

Do you have anything else in mind? Maybe we can answer your question here.

Can I build a landing page for free?

Yes, it’s absolutely possible to create a landing page for free. By making use of free landing page builders, and maybe even templates, you could craft a landing page without having to cough up a cent. The only issue with this is that the free versions of these tools are generally severely limited compared to the premium version. If you’re fine with this, however, then feel free to go ahead.

Where can I set up free landing page?

There are many landing page tools and templates that are offered completely for free. Some that we would recommend include HubSpot, Wix, Canva, Carrd, and Systeme.io.

Does Canva host landing pages?

Yes, indeed it does! You can either host your landing pages on up to 5 subdomains on the Canva domain, or else, if you prefer a more customized landing page, you can purchase a domain straight from Canva and publish there.

Can you have a landing page without a website?

Yes, absolutely! You don’t need to have your own website as you can host the landing page on a separate domain. Moreover, your landing page only has to get users to convert—you don’t need a whole website to collect email addresses, for example!

How much does a good landing page cost?

A good landing page that will have a greater chance of getting visitors to convert will set you back quite a bit. Depending on the complexity of your landing page, and whether you decide to outsource the service, you’re looking at anywhere from $100 – $5000.

Is Google Sites good for landing page?

Yes, you can use Google Sites to create a landing page. Thanks to its user-friendly and dead-simple drag-and-drop interface, as well as its range of customizable templates, Google Sites is a great option for creating landing pages for free.

Can I create a landing page with my phone?

For sure! You can indeed create landing pages on your phone using landing page builders that are designed specifically for mobile phone users. A few examples of these would include Mailchimp and Phonesites.

Is the Wix landing page builder free?

Yes, Wix’s landing page builder is available for free. Naturally, however, bear in mind that these landing page builders are freemium products; in other words, you only have access to basic features for free. Otherwise, you need to pay if you want more advanced features.

Does GoDaddy provide landing pages?

Yes! GoDaddy offers a host of professional-looking landing page templates that show that you mean business.

What is required for a landing page?

Thankfully, you don’t need a whole lot of moving parts to create a landing page as it’s essentially a webpage that’s been stripped down to a few elements in order to get the user to convert. Essentially, all you need for a landing page is a heading, a CTA, images, and a few bits of text (known as the ad copy).

Can a website just be a landing page?

Yes, a website can just be a landing page… but it’s hardly worth the effort to create a whole website just for a landing page. In our opinion, if you don’t wish to create a website for your ad campaign, it’s often a good idea to host your landing page on other domains, like Canva or WordPress.