Creating a Great Landing Page

As you make use of Google's Adwords (or another PPC network) you will need to make sure that you have a highly optimized landing page. It's not a good idea to create great ads for the product you're promoting only to take the reader to a generic page that has little to do with what they are trying to find. It's important to match the advertisement, the keywords you bid on, and the landing page as closely as you can.

Google's Adwords algorithm pays very close attention to how targeted your landing page is when they give you a quality score. This quality score is very important to your campaign! If you have a landing page that is not relevant to the ad and offers little quality to your visitor, then you will be given a low score. You'll have to pay a lot more for your ads, and you might even get "Google Slapped." This can make it nearly impossible for you to have a profitable campaign since Google will move your required bids to an impossible level.

That's why you should always make sure that your landing page matches the keywords you are bidding on. This often means just doing good SEO on the page itself. For example, if you were promoting the "Acne Free in 3 Days" eBook from Clickbank, you would want the exact keyword and related keywords in the title of your webpage, throughout the content, and in the meta data.

It is also very important to have actual content on your page and not just an affiliate link. Google's automated system (and sometimes their manual reviewers) looks at the total package of your landing page.

If you want to see some good landing page examples, you might want to search for top keywords in your niche and examine the landing pages people are linking to from their ads. Since you are just researching, you do not want to click their ads as that is not fair to them! (Remember, they pay every time the ad is clicked). Instead, you can copy and paste the URL to examine their website and landing page.

Take notes on how they have done things effectively. Evaluating your competition in this way is key when you're choosing how you want your landing page (and your campaign in general) formatted.

Just how important are landing pages? Well, consider that all of the candidates for the presidential election of 2008 used landing pages as a major part of their online campaign strategies.

The actual steps for creating great landing page do not have to be hard either! For example, if you have a niche blog, you can simply create a new post for the product you are promoting and target it appropriately. When you set up your Google ad you will link to the specific post rather than to your niche blog in general.

Note that sometimes you will not want to just point to a post on your blog. If you are using this as a list building activity (which can be highly successful when you use pay per click), then you will want to link to your squeeze page instead. Note that this page should not be devoid of content and should also be highly targeted to the keywords in your ad in general.

Hopefully you understand the importance of matching your ad and keywords to your landing page. Your conversions will be higher and what you pay per click will be lower. It's a winning situation all around.