Landing Page Creation and Optimization Tips for Google Adwords

It is expensive to buy traffic using pay per click. It is expensive to “optimize” your website pages for natural search. In both cases, the ultimate goal is to convert these clicks to conversions so that you see a nice return on your investment (ROI). One way to increase your ROI is to increase the conversion rate on the pages that visitors land on when they click on your ads or visit your site as a result of natural search.

There are really two kinds of landing pages; campaign specific landing pages, and organic searched pages. People who know what they want click on ads, and they are different from organic searchers doing research. They want what they searched for, and they want it fast. Your landing pages should provide them with facts, take them exactly where they want to be without any hassles, and make it simple for them to get what they want.
So what should you consider when designing your pages to increase conversions?

What is the Most Effective Landing Page?

Avoid using your home page as your landing page. Create specific landing pages for every ad and paid search term. If this seems daunting, remember that retailers can use the "product page" as a landing page, and service providers can use the "service page". However, if you have the time and resources, the most effective thing to do is to create landing pages specifically targeted towards your PPC campaign. This provides you with more freedom to customize the design of your landing page.
If the ad campaign is a temporary offer, you won't want this landing page indexed by search engines, and you can use the robots.txt file to tell search engine spiders not to index it. It would be embarrassing if you remove the ad listing but consumers continue to find this landing page because it appears in the natural search results.

What Goes On the Landing Page?

Make sure your landing pages answers these questions:

• What's the offer?
• Who's interested?
• Why are they interested, and why should they take further action?
• How do they get started?

On your landing pages, start with benefits, not features, and use persuasive wording.

• Be Concise – If you use paragraphs, use one idea per paragraph and use no more than three lines. Use bullet points. Make headlines bold and prominent.
• Match the Wording on your Landing Page
• Use a Big Call-To-Action Image Button – placed in the top right of the page.
• Show the Price, show the shipping information.
• Make Sure the Page is Grammatically Correct
• Show Credibility – Add testimonials, awards, partners, associations. Show product ratings or reviews. Include a phone number! You want to establish trust.
• Don’t Clutter the Page, and Use Images – make sure the landing page looks professional and appealing. Put graphic on the left side. Make sure the page looks good on a mobile phone.
• Show some cross-sells. Show “best sellers” or “best value” services.
• Use Short Forms – do your need to have more information than: Full Name, Email, Phone, Product or Service interest?
• Thank You. Make sure you thank them afterwards. You can even give them an unexpected bonus like a link to a survey or a case study.

The Message From Your Ad Listing

Make sure the content on your landing pages works with your ad copy, and follows through on your ad promise. For example, if your ad says you are a low cost provider, show them price comparisons on the landing page. In this way you begin to establish trust with your site visitors because your message is consistent, from the ad to your landing page. Trust will increase your sales and encourage long-time customers.

Position Critical Information At the Top of the Page

Your landing page does not have to be short, but all the important information, like benefits and the order button should be visible without scrolling. Web developers refer to this as "above the fold." Since people use different size screens and different browsers, make sure you test this information placement. Your landing page might look great on a 1024x768 screen resolution, but most of your visitors are still using 800x600 screen resolution, and they won’t see the buy button without scrolling. Make sure this is not the case.

Don’t Give Visitors Too Many Navigational Choices

On really targeted landing pages, you should completely remove the website navigation and provide only links which will help complete the sale (such as shipping information and the privacy policy).
You don’t want to give customers too many choices on your landing pages. It might distract them before they buy. Once they complete their purchase, then you can take them to a "thank you" page that offers them links to search the rest of your site.

Use Action Words

Use words that easily convey what you want the visitor to do, like Buy Now, Sign Up, Download, and Add to Cart. In addition, make sure you put the words in a place on the page where they will be noticed. Many people ignore the top 60 pixels of a screen because that's where they expect to see a banner ad. Make your buttons large, graphical, and brightly colored, and put them in the middle of the landing page, above the fold.

Consider the Google Quality Score:

Since many of the landing pages you will be designing will correspond directly to your Google Adwords campaigns, it is important to understand the Google Quality Score.
The Google Quality Score system affects everyone who runs adwords because it determines what position and where your ad will appear on the sponsored listings. On August 21, 2008 Google changed the way the quality score affects ads, based in part on landing pages. It now matters what content is on your landing pages – it has to match your advertising copy, and load time matters too, among other factors. If you increase your Quality Score, you will lower the minimum bid necessary for your ad to appear.
Since this is an automated process for Google, then your landing page content should be text-based. So take the content out of the FLASH portion of your landing pages, or duplicated it in text.

Testing Your Landing Pages

We need to test the landing pages, and we need to test in a strategic manner. Remember that a conversion may be different for different marketing campaigns and even different for types of companies, for instance, a B To B conversion is just getting people to sign up for your newsletter so you have their email addresses, and a B to C conversion means that they buy something from you. A landing page will improve the quality of the visitors to your site, but overall, this may decrease the total number of visitors to your site. Just keep that in mind.
Another thing about testing is that you have to remember that you will be testing metrics, and any kind of testing of metric is political because you are measuring something that some person worked on. You will probably upset the technical people and the creative people in your organization when you put in place landing page testing.
On the other hand, testing is a much better idea than “redesigning the site” because It can really save you money when you test a concept rather than scrap a whole site based on the idea that a new site will be better. There are a lot of sophisticated tools you can use to test a landing page, including a free one, Google Website Optimizer. The idea is to use the tools after you develop your testing plan, so that you don’t waste time and money on the testing. Google website optimizer allows for A/B Split Testing. Remember that the most effective way of A/B split testing is only changing one element at a time.

Things to Include Which Can Help To Increase Conversions

• Give a deadline for ordering, tell them that a price increase is coming, or that a trial period is expiring.
• Give away a free gift, or free accessories.
• Tell them they can not get this offer anywhere else.

Make sure they know there is “no risk” and they can return or cancel at any time.

What is a GOOD Conversion Rate?

Here is an interesting fact. Google says that an average conversion rate for an ad is 2%. That means that 98% of those landing on your pages are not converting!
Conversion rates will always be higher for "soft" offers than for "hard" offers. So an ad that offers a free download will result in a higher conversion rate than an ad that sells high-priced products or intangible services. A free offer can result in conversion rates of 20 to 30 percent -- and even higher. For B2C eCommerce sales, it shouldn't be difficult to achieve above 5 percent. And for softer offers -- low-priced products, free trial software downloads, etc. -- 10 to 20 percent conversion rate is definitely achievable. With testing you should be able to raise all of your conversion rates.

Optimizing a Landing Page for Natural Search

Ultimately you want conversions from organic search because this can be far more cost effective in the long run. Start with an internal audit of all of your pages to determine if they are appropriate or in need of an upgrade. If you have a statistical program on your pages, check the bounce rates for each page, and determine where you need to place most of your effort. Your website pages should be structured to provide valuable information, pertinent for the search word. Each page should have a keyword focused theme, and offer incentives toward making a sale. Keep the page simple and informative, and add a call to action on every page in your site if it is a commercial enterprise.

Internal Linking: On pages with the highest Google PR (page rank) create at least 5 links to your preferred landing page using the keywords that you want to rank for in the link text. This tells search engines that the landing page is important. If you follow this guideline you won’t have to do as much external linking (from other sites) to get your content on the first page of Google. How you link to your content (both internally and externally from other sites) determines the organic search ranking.
Optimize your image alt attributes and make sure the same image principles for ad landing pages apply to natural landing pages. Position the image on the left.
In many cases a content management system will make it easy to change pages quickly, or you can use your blog to create pages quickly. Create the content specifically for each of your main areas of interest. For natural search it is much better to LOTS of small pages with specific information than a few pages that follow your corporate structure.
Remember that achieving organic rankings takes a long time, but that it is well worthwhile because it allows you to become an authority on your topic. You should continually add new content on a regular basis using keywords you wish to rank for in the copy and titles. Once you become an authority to Google, then just mentioning a new product from your home page will result in almost instant natural rankings.
Even though this method may take as long as a year of consistent work, your pages will begin to appear with greater frequency and bring quality traffic.

In Conclusion:

Landing pages should convert web clicks into clients, and make that first all-important impression of your company. The better you test and improve them, the more conversions you will see.