ppc landing page

I’m a huge fan of PPC landing pages! Landing pages are the “on-page” side of pay per click marketing. In the world of SEO, there have always existed both on-page and off-page strategies. Savvy SEO marketers invest a ton of time, both on-page and off-page. PPC, historically speaking, has been more focused on off-page elements (managing campaigns in Google AdWords and Bing Ads). However, I’m here to challenge the norm! I personally recommend that PPC marketers focus a significant amount of time on on-page optimization (landing page optimization). Following are some of my favorite PPC landing page tips.

Landing Pages

Invest in a landing page platform, such as ion interactive. It’s so much easier to build, test, and manage landing pages with a cutting edge platform like ion. Think about the parallels with SEM bid management platforms and how difficult the bidding process is in Excel versus a cutting edge platform. Same goes for landing pages! An added benefit for agencies: Have your client place a landing page platform on their site. This will give the agency control over both campaigns and customer experience! It’s a huge challenge for agencies to have influence over on-site user experience. Landing page platforms bridge that gap.
Stay consistent with your company’s brand guidelines. If brand guidelines don’t exist, develop them yourself by interviewing influential members of your organization. I’m a huge fan of consistency. You want to go big and test big, however you want to also stay very true to your company’s overall brand image. The user experience should never be jarring to the consumer. Even though you manage landing pages and your PM team manages your website, it should all flow the same.
Consider dynamic elements on your landing pages. It’s all about personal customization. Maybe have prices/offers relevant to the geography of the visitor. Perhaps you know a bit about the customer from their past browsing behavior on your site and you present a custom offer/package. Maybe it’s as simple as analyzing the search query in real time and offering up a landing page relevant to that specific search query. The opportunities are endless. A well designed SEM account will always have granular, tightly-themed adgroups. Make sure your landing page strategy follows accordingly.
Consider going beyond a simple landing page, and create a landing page minisite. SEM landing pages are focused. It’s all about making it easy for the consumer. Minisites are awesome because they allow you to get all of that additional information in there without distracting the core flow.
Landing pages don’t just have to be one page. In addition to minisites (see last tip), consider taking more of the flow under your control. If your site offers an API or another means of deep integration, consider hosting/managing the first few pages of the flow as part of your landing page experience optimization. The deeper you can go in the funnel, the more opportunity you have to test and improve conversion rate. Important tip: Make sure you work closely with your PM team and are on the same page.
Building upon the last part of the last tip, share your success stories across your company. Your learnings from PPC landing page optimization have direct impact on other areas of your organization. Offer up your channel as a testing ground. I love digital advertising because you can learn so much so fast. Make sure the landing page part of your program is treated the same, it’s a testing ground for quick learnings across your organization.
Don’t forget retargeting. Make sure your retargeting pixels are placed on your PPC landing pages (and across your entire website). I’m particularly a fan of retargeting PPC traffic because PPC tends to be one of the highest converting and most valuable sources of traffic.

How are you leveraging landing pages in your digital marketing program?

Image of guy looking at landing pages © iStockPhoto – Silent47

If you’ve been in pay per click search engine marketing for a while, there’s no doubt you’ve faced landing page quality score issues at least once. I’ve managed AdWords campaigns for dozens of sites. Thankfully, the majority of these sites have been multi-million-dollar category leaders with excellent landing page quality scores. However, a few of them have not been so fortunate. Today, I’m looking forward to sharing my thoughts around optimizing your landing pages for Google’s quality score. Specifically, I’ll discuss a few SEO-style tips that directly impact PPC quality scores.

Tip 1: Meta Data Affects PPC Quality Score

Red Matrix

If you’ve optimized sites for SEO, you’ve definitely worked with the title, meta description, and meta keywords tags within the HTML head section. In the SEO world, these tags are extremely important – they directly affect the ad copy of your listing within the organic results. However, I’m here to highlight that these tags also affect your PPC quality score. Just think about it: The existence of targeted meta data shows Google that your landing page is part of "real" website, one that is well thought through and directly relevant to the keywords in question.

Some tactical tips: Keep your title to 8 to 10 keywords (or fewer), your meta description to 156 characters or less, and your meta keywords to 8 to 10 (or fewer). Moreover, make sure the keywords that you’re targeting are included throughout (especially at the beginning), but don’t overdo it.

Tip 2: Keyword-Optimize Your Landing Pages

I’m sure you’ve heard it time and time again: Content is king! This statement is absolutely true for PPC, just like SEO. It’s critical to not only keyword-optimize your title, meta description, and meta keywords, but also your overall landing page. You don’t need to go crazy, but it’s super beneficial to sprinkle your keyword across the page, at least a few times.

So, you have millions of keywords. Does this mean you need millions of custom landing pages? Absolutely not! My advice: Work with your engineering team to build a dynamic landing page (or a series of pages around the major themes), one that renders "customized" depending on the incoming keyword. My preference is to have a table on the back end that maps keywords to the custom, dynamic content rather than passing the content in through the URL string.

Tip 3: Leverage All Major HTML Text Formatting Tags

Another simple, yet very practical tip: Make sure to leverage the common HTML formatting tags. Some examples include <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <strong>, and <em>. The story behind this: You’re trying to show search engines that your landing page is well thought through. By including these tags, your PPC landing page becomes a well optimized SEO experience, one that shows search engines just how relevant your site is to the user.

Tip 4: Include Important Links In Your Footer

From my experience, there are several absolutely critical links that must be present in all of your PPC landing page footers: Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions, Site Map, and Contact Us. Google is all about credibility and transparency. By including these links in your footer, you’re being absolutely open and honest with your visitors.

If you leverage AdSense on your site, it’s actually required that you have a privacy policy on your landing page discussing Google’s use of cookies. Moreover, new FTC guidelines require Ts and Cs, Privacy Policies, and Affiliate Disclaimers to be more robust than ever. I take all of this stuff very seriously.

Tip 5: Add Alt Tags To All Images

The title of this tip says it all: Make sure your image alt tags are descriptive and relevant. It’s yet one more data point that can help Google determine the relevancy of your landing page. Of course, it’s very important to be accurate and keep your alt tags short.

Tip 6: Make Sure Search Engines Don’t Index PPC Landing Pages

So far, all of my tips have been geared toward improving the landing page quality score of your pay per click landing pages. However, I wanted to close out with a tip that will help maintain your great relationship with your organization’s SEO team.

I highly recommend coordinating closely with your SEO team, informing them of all your PPC landing pages. Most of the time, you will want to make sure to noindex your PPC pages. In PPC, it’s totally ok to have hundreds (or even thousands) of very similar pages that may differ only slightly for the keyword in question. However, such a practice in SEO is very bad, one that would be considered duplicate content. The solution: Orphan your PPC landing pages from the main site while noindexing them as well. The user will be able to go from your landing page to the main site, but a user from your main site will not find your pay per click landing pages (and moreover they will not get indexed by search engines).

My Favorite PPC Landing Page Tips

Quality Score: SEO Tips For PPC Landing Pages