Why Your Ads Should Never Point at Your Homepage

A homepage has to serve everybody: existing clients, job applicants, referral sources, and seven different kinds of prospective client. A landing page has to serve one person who typed one thing. Those are incompatible jobs.

Message match is a discount

When somebody searches for a specific term and lands on a page whose headline repeats that term, two things happen. The visitor immediately knows they are in the right place, so they stay and convert at a much higher rate. And Google's quality score rises, which lowers what you pay for the next click on that term.

In legal advertising, where a single click can cost more than a nice dinner, that second effect compounds fast. A mismatched page literally raises your cost per click.

What a legal landing page needs

A headline matching the search term word for word. No site navigation, so there is nothing to click except the thing you want clicked. A phone number that is tappable and visible without scrolling on a phone. Proof that you are credible. A booking mechanism on the page itself rather than a link to another page. And the same call to action repeated as the visitor scrolls.

Everything else is optional. Navigation, in particular, is a leak: every link is an invitation to leave without converting.

One page per ad group

The rule is one landing page per ad group, not one per campaign. If you are bidding on both law firm SEO and law firm PPC, those are different pages with different headlines, even though the underlying pitch overlaps heavily.

These pages should also be set to noindex so they never compete with your indexed service pages in organic search. They exist for paid traffic and nothing else.