What is a Landing Page?

A landing page, at its most basic level, is a page on a website that people “land” on, generally from ad campaigns. If you search for what a landing page is online, you’ll find a variety of  articles and companies (aka Big Landing Page companies) telling you why their solution is the best and why you need to spend money on their software to have a successful marketing campaign.

But before you go out and purchase expensive software, let’s talk about what we actually need for a landing page, and if you even need them.

What Makes a Good Landing Page?

This can vary depending on what you are trying to achieve. If you are just looking for brand recognition or getting traffic to your site in general, your home page may be an acceptable landing page. It probably has the basic necessities, such as contact information, an overview of your practice, and at least one call-to-action. Make sure that your practice is easily identifiable as a dental office, and that the user can find your phone number, address, and a contact form easily.

For more targeted campaigns, such as an Invisalign or dental implant campaign, you’ll want to send users to a more focused page that is all about that specific service. Enter your “Landing Page”.

Here’s where my opinion starts to stray from many marketers. I don’t think you always need to create a new a stand-alone landing page or use fancy funnel software to have effective landing pages for your campaigns. And I think that there are advantages to using your existing service pages on your site, assuming they are built well and have the right information a user needs to make a decision.

Plus, if you invest the time improving the website you already have, it will convert better for all website traffic, not just from your new marketing campaign.

There are two main reasons why I advocate for using your existing service pages for most dental practices’ online ad campaigns.

First, if your existing service pages already have the necessary content, why would you want to reinvent the wheel? A proper service page, and a proper dental landing page, will include the following:

• Easy to find contact information
• Verbiage about the service, including who the service benefits, if your practice has any unique ways of doing the service, and what the benefits of the service are
• Video content of someone in the practice explaining the service
• Before and after photos, if appropriate (don’t use these for services such as extractions)
• Patient testimonials, related to the service if possible
• A quick bio or link to the bio of the person(s) who perform the service

Secondly, Google ads are primarily sold on a “cost per click” (CPC) basis.  Essentially, you pay nothing for the ad, unless someone clicks on it. One of the factors that plays into your CPC and your overall performance on Google Ads is your “quality score”. Your quality score is how relevant or useful Google believes your page is relative to the ad. 

So if you have an ad about Invisalign, and it goes to a page with no information about Invisalign at all – Google will not find that very relevant, and it will give you a low quality score.

This will make your ads cost more, or worse, it may make your ad appear less prominently – or not at all! Think of it as a tax for poorly optimized content.

Now, I am not saying that Big Landing Pages should never be used. We use them for some of our own marketing and we’ve used them for certain client campaigns. They can be great if you know your users are ready to buy your service or product or if you are asking them to do a very specific action such as downloading a whitepaper or signing up for an event. But in most cases, they aren’t completely necessary for most basic dental marketing campaigns.

What Should I Include on a Standalone Landing Page?

If you do decide to use a Big Landing Page company for your campaign, I’ll offer the following advice:

• Pick a simple layout that works on any device
• Take a few minutes to set up your page so it goes to your actual domain rather than going to a web address like “www.biglandingpage.com/pages/ci348sj”
• Make sure the branding matches the general look and feel of your existing website
• Make contact information easy to find
• Offer more than 1 way for a user to contact your office
• Double and triple check that the contact form is set to go to an email address you actively use (don’t leave it on the default!)
• Use a tracking number on your ads that matches the number on your landing page
• Make sure you have Google Analytics installed on that page so you can see how people are interacting with your page and what improvements you need to make

Some of these products can get really expensive (think $300+/month), so really do your research on which software you think you can easily understand and use. You don’t need to blow half your ad spend on the software to have a successful campaign.

If you have questions about your landing page or want to talk about what might work best for your campaign, you can contact me via email (jeff@greatdentalwebsites.com) or phone (720-399-7071).

Although Jeff comes from a family of 7 dentists, he never received “the calling” and instead became a software engineer. After creating a website for his dad’s clinic, he was approached by other members of his family to create their websites, and eventually founded Great Dental Websites. What started as a family project has evolved into the company it is today, serving over 800 practices worldwide, supported by a team of over 40 employees between our Denver and Sydney offices.