search campaign Archives -

Landing Page Quality Really Hurting My Quality Score?

This has been such a debate throughout the years. Whether it is with a client or within your company, landing pages and the quality of them and how this impacts your paid search marketing has always been something that has been talked about yet nobody really has had a good answer. Google has made this much easier now to find this out by telling you!

Landing Page Quality – How Do I Know?

Google wants your landing pages to be relevant, ulta relevant to the paid search keywords and ad. They want this so that you convert higher and want to spend more money while limiting any click fraud settlements they have to make. Most industry experts have always said if your search quality score for a keyword (or ad group) has been a 1 out of 10 there must be some kind of violation going on. I really do not subscribe to this theory because many keywords within a poorly structured ad group can give you a QS of 1 yet the overall health of the ad group is good. Google has not been very transparent about this and it has left you guessing as to why. Take a look at the screenshot below:

Notice how it clearly tells you? NICE! You have no idea how many “discussions” I have had with people about how landing pages are causing higher CPCs via bad quality scores. Now they tell you which is which. If you’ve violated an actual Google policy, you’ll get a “site suspended” notice.

My Landing Page Shows No Violation – Now What?

This is where you need to stop and re-evaluate you entire paid search marketing strategy! It starts with your keywords, flows to the ad reads, and converts on the landing page. If you have not adopted a paid search strategy that looks at these key elements as a whole, it is now the time to start! First thing you need to do is is review Google’s terms of service for landing pages at: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&guide=28439&topic=30210&page=guide.cs . Then I would dive deep into your paid search campaign and find where you are doing the right and wrong things! From here you can make changes and optimize.

Google’s offical announcement is located at: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/04/more-clarity-in-adwords-for-advertisers.html.

How SEO and PPC Can Optimize Each Other

Search engine optimization and paid search marketing have always been like “neighbors” to most companies and agencies instead of “family”. Some small businesses I have worked with in the past have outsourced one function while having a in-house resource for the other. This is fine and can be very successful but the lack of communication between the two that happens the majority of the time, causes inefficiencies in optimization of both functions. If your company resembles this condition here are some tips on how SEO and PPC Marketing can help optimize each other.

Have your search engine marketing and paid search work together

Benefits of Optimization of Paid Search Marketing and Search Engine Optimization

There have been a few studies done on this topic that have shown when you combine a website that ranks high from SEO with paid search ads being displayed on the same keyword you double your overall traffic from that keyword. In 2007 a company called I Company did an in depth study called “Natural & Search Symbiosis” that showed:

92% increase in clicks
45% increase in actions taken on the site
45% increase in orders
44% increase in page views
40% increase in visitors
40% increase in time spent on site

If you think about it, it just makes sense. Your taking up more valuable real estate in which your potential customers see you more and you are also limiting the competition to be seen as well.

Share Top Converting Keywords

By sharing the top converting search engine optimization keywords and paid search keywords with each function you give yourself a great opportunity to increase your conversion rates on both sides by:

Allowing PPC to incorporate those keywords into their campaign
Allowing search to raise positioning for those terms should they already be within a specific search campaign
Give SEO more keywords to target
Give SEO valuable information that will drive a targeted link building campaign

Share Top Search Ads & SEO Titles

SEO is just not about high rankings but click throughs as well. Don’t get me wrong, you need high placement from SEO to get traffic but once you are placed in the top 10 for a specific keyword your title of the page is what drives the visitor to click similar to your paid search ad drives click as well. A great tactic I have used is to incorporate top ad titles from your search marketing ads as page titles for your SEO pages and vice versa. If you are already seeing that visitors are responding to these titles with a high click rate then why not maximize this?

By using a co-optimized method it will prove that the limitations of one discipline can be helped by the strengths of the other. This will help keep PPC costs down and drive overall conversions and efficiency up. If done correctly, this dual optimization will save you time and money by giving your team more time to test, more time to report, and more time to refine each campaign.