Landing Page vs Homepage: Which One Should You Send Traffic To?
Sending campaign traffic to your homepage asks the visitor to find their own way. What changes when you send it to a landing page instead, and when it should not.
The cursor is blinking in an empty heading box and it has been blinking for twenty minutes. Everything you type sounds either boastful or boring, so you delete it, and the page stays unwritten.
The reason this feels hard is that you are asking the headline to do too much. It is not the argument. It is not the pitch. It has one small job, and once you know what that job is, five minutes usually produces something usable.
The one job of a headline
A headline exists to make the second line worth reading. That is the whole brief.
It does not have to close the sale, list your credentials, or capture everything you do. It has to keep a person on the page for four more seconds, and it does that by convincing them they are in the right place.
This reframing matters because it kills the temptation to be clever. Clever headlines make the reader stop and work out what you meant. Working things out is effort, and effort spent on your wordplay is effort not spent reading your offer. A plain headline that says exactly what the page is about holds more people than a witty one, because it asks nothing of them.
Specific keeps readers. Clever costs them.
Four headline shapes that work
Most good headlines are one of four shapes. Pick whichever fits what you sell.
The plain offer. State the thing, the price and the timeframe, in that order. Fixed-price boiler service, £89, booked within three working days. Nobody reading that is confused about where they have landed. It works best when your offer is genuinely competitive, because it puts the strongest fact first.
The problem, said back to them. Describe the situation the reader is in right now, in their words. Your rental property failed its electrical inspection and you have twenty-eight days. This shape earns attention because recognition feels like being understood. It fails if you guess the problem wrong, so use it only when the traffic is narrow enough that you know.
The outcome with a deadline. Skip the service and describe the after. Sash windows draught-free before winter, without replacing a single frame. Useful when what you sell is unpleasant to think about but the result is easy to want.
The narrow specialism. Say what you only do. Only wedding photography. Only in Yorkshire. Twelve weekends a year. Narrowness reads as competence, and it filters out the enquiries you did not want anyway. This is the shape to reach for when you are more expensive than the alternatives.
The specificity test
Here is a test that takes ten seconds and settles most arguments.
Cover your logo, hand the headline to someone, and ask whether your closest competitor could put their name on it unchanged. If they could, it is not a headline. It is a category label.
Quality plumbing you can trust fails instantly. Every plumber in the county could run that line tomorrow. Emergency leaks, sealed the same day, across Leeds and Bradford belongs to whoever wrote it, because it commits to something a slower firm could not honestly copy.
The way out is almost always a fact you already have and assumed was boring. Your response time. Your service area. Your minimum job size. The one material you specialise in. How long you have been trading. What is included in the price and what is not.
Adjectives fail the test because adjectives are free. Nouns, numbers and place names cost something to claim, which is exactly why they carry weight. Use only the facts you can defend. A headline that promises what the page then walks back does more damage than a dull one.
The subheadline, the half nobody writes
The headline gets all the attention and then people stop, leaving it carrying weight it was never designed for. The subheadline is the line underneath, in smaller type, and it is where the qualifying happens.
Its job is to answer the two or three questions the headline just provoked. Who is this for. Where do you work. What does the price include. What happens after I fill in the form.
Take Fixed-price boiler service, £89, booked within three working days. The reader immediately wants to know: £89 for what, exactly, and do you come out to my postcode? So the subheadline says it. Full service, safety check and certificate for domestic gas boilers in the LS and BD postcodes. Parts quoted separately before any work starts.
That second line is unglamorous and it does more work than the first. It also lets the headline stay short, because it no longer has to smuggle in the conditions. Write them as a pair and both get easier.
Write five, choose one
Do not try to write the headline. Write five bad ones instead, quickly, in one sitting.
Take the four shapes above and write one of each, then a fifth that is deliberately blunter than you would ever publish. The fifth is often closest to right, because it is the one where you stopped performing.
Then read all five aloud. It sounds like a writing-class exercise, but the ear catches what the eye forgives. Anything you would feel silly saying to a customer on the phone is wrong for the page too.
Then check each one against the traffic. If the ad, the email or the flyer used a particular phrase, the headline should echo that phrase rather than a smarter rewrite of it. The arriving visitor is checking they are in the right place; a matching phrase answers that instantly.
Choose the one that survives all three. Live with it a week, then look again.
Traps worth knowing about
Puns. They cost a beat of comprehension and buy nothing.
Questions the reader can answer no to. Struggling with your accounts? invites a shrug and a back tap.
Your own name as the headline. Welcome to Barlow and Sons Roofing tells a stranger nothing they came to find out. The company name belongs in the logo, not the largest text on the page.
Promises the page does not keep. The headline sets the expectation that the rest of the page is measured against.
If the blank box is the problem, start from one of the free templates we give away: the headline and subheadline are already sized and spaced, and writing into a shape is easier than inventing one.
