If you’re using Google AdWords, a good landing page can provide your business with a series of important benefits, including improving your Quality Score, which in turn can help to improve your ad position and lower your cost per click. A good landing page can also improve conversions, save you money and have a substantial influence on whether a campaign succeeds or fails.
Landing pages are those pages on your website that people first see when they find your site through a search engine – either from the ‘organic’ results, or via the paid listings such as AdWords. Each landing page therefore gives the site visitor a first impression of your business and plays a key role in conversion optimisation – getting a visitor to complete the task on your site that you want them to, whether it’s to make a sale, send an enquiry or sign up for a newsletter.
As noted above, a landing page is an important element in Google AdWords as it can contribute to an improved Quality Score. Each time you create or amend an advert, Google will automatically visit the landing page being used from the ad and assess how well the landing page will work, so there are some key requirements to consider.
The following tips need to be followed to ensure visitors enjoy your landing page experience and that you can maximise your Quality Score for each keyword:
- Make sure your landing page has content that is relevant and closely related to the text ads and keywords used. You should check the title tag, description tag and body content for the terms being used.
- Visitors should be able to easily find what they want. If your text ad is selling a product, make sure the product is easy for visitors to find once they are sent to your landing page.
- Ensure your landing page offers unique and useful information, including offers that are unique and only available from your site.
- Contact information on the landing page should be easy for visitors to see, and if a landing page requires information through a form, it is important to let the visitor know why and for what purpose.
- Make sure the privacy policy of your business is easy to access from the landing page.
- If you are selling online, make sure that personal data is collected using a secure processing server (https) with a valid certificate.
- If you are showing adverts on your landing page, make these clearly distinctive from your own content.
- Avoid pop-ups and other features that can be considered annoying to visitors.
- Make sure that the back button works if visitors want to return to the search results.
- You should also consider how your page is viewed from a mobile device if this is a core part of your advertising market.
In summary, a landing page should be easy for visitors to use and it should portray a sense of trust. The landing page should be highly related to the text ad and keyword that enticed the visitor to click the advertisement. A landing page should be easy to understand and visitors should be able to quickly locate more information if it’s needed.
If you’d like more information about landing pages, or a review of those you are using, please contact us for more information – we are one of Australia’s leading AdWords consultants since 2006.
This blog was first published in 2014, updated 2018.