Copyright (c) 2008 Paul Smithson
As soon as someone clicks on a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ad on your page they are instantly transported to the page you specified when placing the ad. This page is usually known as the ‘Landing Page’.
Landing pages for PPC need to have several elements in place, more so if you’re using Google AdWords to send traffic as Google has strict quality control measures which are increasing all the time.
Google Adwords has a bot which will crawl landing pages and gather vital information. They use the information they gather to assign that landing page a quality score. If the quality score is too low, then the minimum bid for the keywords that get a lower score will be much higher. Sometimes this can add up to several dollars more per keyword!
When you make your landing pages, there are several things which you can do so that you have the best possible chance of getting a good quality score.
The first thing you should do is make sure you have the keywords you’ve chosen for your campaign somewhere on the landing page. Google wants to be certain your keywords are relevant, so they want to see the keywords you choose on the landing page you’re sending traffic to.
You should also try to avoid sending AdWords traffic to a landing page with no linked content. Google often likes to send traffic to full sites and not just landing pages. You’ll get a higher quality score if you have several other pages linked from the landing page. These could be articles, product pages, reviews, editorial, links pages, or any other page that is appropriate for such a landing page. Remember, Google looks kindly on relevancy, so it is important to keep things themed properly to the niche you are targeting.
Google often likes to think that they are sending traffic to professional companies, so having a privacy policy and a ‘contact us’ page can help improve your quality score.
Your landing pages themselves should also have some content. You are unlikely to get a good quality score if your web page only has a single link to a sponsor or an opt-in box. Including even just a handful of relevant body copy will help to ensure you don’t get penalized for not having sufficient content. Remember relevancy. Keep the text related to the niche you are wanting to target, and try to include as many of the keywords you’re targeting as possible.
To summarize, try to make sure that you are sending people from the PPC ad to a genuine page on a genuine site. If you can honestly say that the landing page would pass the test of a real human from Google approving it then the chances are that any automated bot is likely to approve of it too.