Landing Pages
With Goolge’s Quality Score, creating a quality landing score is increasingly important. If you are off target you will have to pay a fortune per click. I have brought down the minimum bid requirement for a given ranking by 90% by simply making the landing page relevant and sing to customers. In many cases, I have seen big design changes actual decrease conversion. Therefore, I suggest an optimization plan starting with a limited budget of PPC driving to landing pages, using Google website optimizer. This will help execute a winning design strategy, plus you will learn which marketing copy to use going forward, plus apply that messaging to banners, text ads and other advertising. This will raise your quality score overall and decrease your cost for qualified traffic.
Understanding Google’s Quality score is critical:
“There is no one specific formula to determine the quality of a landing page or website. On a case-by-case basis, we will evaluate the content, structure, and navigation of a website. Keep in mind, the most relevant landing pages will include a substantial amount of content that is highly relevant to not only your choice of keywords, but also to your ad text.”
You can assumer that Google isn’t doing this manually. If it is an automated solution, then your landing pages must be text-based. Applying some of the SEO techniques and putting general words in images while keeping relevant words in text format is critical and isn’t hard with a solid understanding of CSS.
What else does Google say about landing pages…?
“The best way to figure out whether your keyword, ad, or landing page is relevant and useful is to put yourself in the shoes of a user. Do your ad and landing page include language that makes sense in the context of the keywords you have chosen? For example, if you have selected the keyword ‘hiking shoes,’ have you made sure that your ad mentions hiking shoes or related name brands? Does your landing page actually offer the name brands you mentioned, along with detailed information about this shoe type?”
“Targeting your keywords, ads, and landing pages in this way likely will lead to several positive results. First, it can help you gain the trust of your customers and therefore keep them coming back to your site. You will also minimise the money spent on clicks from users who might not be interested in what your website offers. And finally, you can increase your overall Quality Score and lower the minimum bid necessary for your ad to appear.”
Create a quality landing page, aimed at improving conversion rates is increasingly important:
- Product images tell stories. Everything that goes into the images creates a mood and a response. Any links that might distract mean more thinking on the part of the user, focusing the consumer’s mind on the end goal: the checkout. This means writing compelling copy. Persuade visitors not to drop out by limiting their options - remove link navigation, for example.
- Don’t make consumer wait for what they want. Make the action one click away. Give customer’s a sense of confidence by providing support numbers or certifications on the landing page. Keep it relevant to that person’s search query, because that’s all they care about. Bullet points work well online, to help communicate the benefits of a product or service. Keep in mind that people skim read on the web. Use bold text to reinforce key messages.
- Create Risk Reversal by giving your customers the peace of mind that your run a quality customer focused business. Conducting usability testing on your landing page templates may also provide you with some answers. Testimonials, press, kitemarks, partners, visible customer support options. All these things convey trust and respectability. They ease the mind of the prospective buyer, who might not know your brand. Trust is very important.
- Persuade your users to convert. Persuasion means removing distractions. Remove navigation unless it is necessary remove other options that distract the user. Guide people do what you want them to do, and don’t give them many other options.
- Make link text appealing people tend to glance over copy instead of deeply reading every word. Since links are action points people tend to pay more attention to link text. Make sure link text is appealing since it is far more likely to get read than most of the page copy.
- Give them a clue they have found the correct page: Place the words they searched for in large text at the top of the page to show them they are in the right location. If you are a large merchant with many products maybe use something like ‘search results for: their search term’. Typically it is best to point people at a landing page instead of the home page. Keep it short and to the point. Paragraphs should be no longer than three lines, if they are used at all. One idea per paragraph is plenty of information fodder. In the case of PPC landing pages you need to match the offer to your text ad copy. Keywords should be highlighted or displayed prominently.