Are you still directing all of your keywords and ad texts to either your site’s homepage or one of your site’s inner pages?
If you answered in the affirmative, then you are most likely finding yourself paying close to, if not, the premium click prices for your keywords and key phrases. If you haven’t realized by now, these pages are not the best places for your destination url’s to point to. The reason lies within the relevance and focus of these pages. Your landing page should be the most relevant and specific page associated with a certain ad group or even keyword or phrase.
For example, if you are a real estate agent and are selling properties in Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and Malibu, instead of having visitors directed to a page within your website that has information and/or properties about all three areas, you should rather have them led to a page that has information about just one of the communities. Even better would be to create a single marketing page (a.k.a landing page) that is just about one area. This will help to increase the quality score of your keywords and phrases, which will in turn lower your click prices, thus allowing you to spend more of your Paid Search Marketing budget or allocate it elsewhere.
Once you set up a unique and focused landing page for each Ad Group within your PPC campaign there are some simple things you can implement to optimize this page to help stretch your budget a little more. These are some very basic steps that anyone can install. For more advanced tips please check back for our follow-up post about Advanced Landing Page Optimization Tactics.
(1) Whatever the page is about (Malibu real estate, used books, iPods), make it very apparent that the visitor has come to the right place. Any and all reassurance of landing on the right page and not being led to an unrelated marketing ploy page will immediately increase your credibility. In addition, it will also help to increase the page’s quality score because when these pages are reviewed by actual people over at Google for instance (yeah, actual people review these pages) they will see that the page is completely relevant to the Ad Group and search terms utilized.
(2) Have as much relevant content on this landing page as possible, but keep it brief. This poses somewhat of a dilemma for most marketers because as they attempt to have as much unique, relevant content on their landing page as possible they are unintentionally scaring away visitors with a seemingly bottomless page of text. The search engines love to see this content, but you have to keep the visitor in mind at all times because they are ultimately the ones who these landing pages need to appeal to first and foremost. So, keep your content very concise, relevant, and unique and a happy medium will be met. Think of how you act when you come across a landing page. How much time do you spend on this page? 15-30 seconds? Does a page of text appeal to you? Are you really going to read all of the landing page text?
(3) Try to include the ad creative you used in your text ads on your landing page and make them very apparent. For example, if you advertised in your ad text:
Santa Monica Real Estate
Looking For Santa Monica Real Estate?
Register Once For Unlimited MLS Access
Make sure to include “Register Once For Unlimited MLS Access” on your landing page. This will again verify that the visitor has come to the right place and has not been led to a spamming site. In addition, it creates another call to action on the landing page, which is what is going to increase your page’s conversion rate.
(4) Keep the design of your landing page simple, and of course, aesthetically pleasing. Remember that you have to keep two people in mind; the visitors who see your landing page and the people who work for Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc that personally review your landing page. If the page is extremely busy with too many photos or cut up in numerous scattered tables, then most people are going to be immediately turned off. Once again, just ask yourself how you react to certain landing pages? Did the page catch your attention? Does the page keep your attention? Does it look professional and make you believe or want to provide your personal information?
There are many more things that can be done to optimize a landing page. In the sake of keeping our blog posts as concise as possible, we are going to follow up this post with successive additions so please check back with us in the coming weeks for more useful and free information.