This tutorial on PPC Landing Page Best Practices was written by the local SEO services experts at LocalSplash.com. Executing the strategies on this page could result in lower costs and improve keyword performance in Google Ads, Yahoo! Marketing Solutions, and Microsoft AdCenter.
How Search Engines Define Quality
Pay-Per-Click is no longer a bidding war thanks to the term “quality”. Google wants to return the most relevant search result to their users so they have defined criteria to reduce costs for those advertisers focusing on quality. For Google, this is defined as “Quality Score”, for Yahoo! it’s “Quality Index” (don’t get the two confused, account managers get snuffy when you use the wrong term).
To achieve higher quality in either engine, it’s recommended that you start by creating isolated pages on your website specifically for A/B testing landing pages. To keep these pages from being indexed in the organic search engine results, create or update a robots.txt file containing the following snippet of code:
User-agent:*
Disallow: /{adwords or other category name, remove brackets}/
How to Get Better Quality Scores (or Quality Index)
Below is a list of things that you can do to achieve improved performance from your PPC Campaign. Note that you cannot control the search engines, but implementing these best practices have shown improved results according to the search engine marketing community and particularly MarketingSherpa.com.
- Start with a template or from PPC Landing Page Examples
- Always include a way for the user to return to the main website
- To reduce SEO implications, add a “noindex,nofollow” meta tag to each page
- Include SEO best practices for keyword & ad-matching (titles, meta tags, headings, nomenclature, etc)
- Reduce the page load time as much as possible
- Use a conversion path or other engaging content to keep the user on the website as long as possible.
- Have a privacy policy anytime you are asking for information on a web page.
Higher Landing Page Conversions
There are other enhancements you can make to improve quality and conversion, the above lists just a few. The single most important landing page factor is conversion.
The best examples of websites made for conversion that we have found are listed below. Notice the clean appearance, videos, call-to-action (“Buy Now”) buttons, etc. You’ll notice that these landing pages don’t look like typical websites. They are built specifically for higher conversion rates.
Sample PPC Landing Pages / Websites
- See the websites powered by Livemercial here
- Try Vinotol landing page
- Miracle Blade landing page
- Softlux Pillow landing page
- Walk Fit landing page
- Light Relief landing page
- Aqua Globes
- Steam Buddy
- Strap Perfect
The “As Seen on TV” industry has done a great job with optimizing landing pages. Apply some the principles used above toward your business to get the highest possible conversion rate.
The above PPC landing page best practices will not only help you to improve visit-to-purchase ratio, but may also lower your costs on PPC engines such as Google Ads, Yahoo! Marketing Solutions and Microsoft AdCenter. Quality is everything, A/B testing to get the best possible quality with the search engines will make the difference between a successful campaign and an expensive, less successful PPC strategy.