Adwords Landing Page Optimization

In the previous tutorial we talked about Ad Relevance which goes hand in hand with landing page optimization. If you are able to sync both of these tips then you are on your way to improved quality score.

Remember, Google is all about offering relevant results to their users, therefor, if your Ad talks about guest lodges and your keyword are variations of guest lodges then naturally your landing page needs to talk about…guest lodges.

Making The Adwords Landing Page (destination URL) Relevant

Choosing targeted keywords: Rather than matching your content to your ads, try to match your ads to your content. Scan through your target page and look for the most prominent topic and then base your ads around that. If the keywords exist on your page, in your title and on your landing page then they usually get high quality scores.

Exclude Missing Words: Try not to target keywords that do not exist in the content of your page. So if your page is about country getaways then don’t try to use guest lodges as a keyword.

Choosing content: I do not recommend changing the content of existing pages to suit your ad, however, in some cases you can create a new page for your ad based on highly searched keywords. If you are not sure what the most searched keywords are for your target page then use the Adwords Keyword Tool to get some ideas. Do not spam the page with keywords that are in your ads, just try to incorporate the words naturally into your content.

Your title is important: Google usually gives higher quality scores to keywords that actually exist in the <title> tag of your landing page.

Link to the final destination: If your website has many products then it is always better to link to the page that has the most information about that product rather than a page that contains many products. This way you can target each product with its own Ad group. This precise form of landing page targeting usually leads to higher quality scores.

Have original content: Google makes it very clear in their quality guidelines to be sure that the content on your landing page is original and does not exist anywhere else on the web. If your website uses content from another site then it is likely that your quality score will take a hit.

Terms & Policies: The most looked over Adwords guideline is to make sure that you have terms, conditions and privacy policy information visible on your site. These pages give your website credibility and trust and in turn help with your quality score.

Creating custom campaign landing pages

If you are not hitting the quality scores you desire, for selected keywords in your campaign, then it may be a good idea to create a landing page specifically for Adwords. Custom made landing pages are flexible and often work best if their content is very similar to your ads. These pages allow you to highlight a particular product which is appealing to the visitor and at the same time target the search engines with relevant content. These pages do not even have to be linked to from your home page, in most cases they are uploaded as Adwords landing pages designed only for Adwords traffic, they have clear call-to-actions and specific content talking only about the topic/product that the page was made for. Once your Adwords campaign is over then these pages simply disappear without your non-Adwords visitors even knowing they ever existed.

What’s Next?

In the next Adwords tutorial we will take a look at Google’s Search Partners and how they make an impact on your CTR. It is important to monitor the performance of Google’s partners in order to keep your CTR’s high.