High Performance PPC: How to Use Landing Pages for Higher Conversions & Lower Cost-Per-Click

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Neglecting attention to your landing pages as part of a PPC campaign is destructive and will result in wasted advertising budget. After all, your landing pages are where your customers ultimately end up and what they see. Customers do not really care about PPC, CPC, CPA, or any of the other terms used by tech gurus. What they want to see is an easy-to-navigate, engaging page that captures their attention and makes it easy for them to find what they are looking for.

The time you spend working on your landing pages will pay off in higher conversion rates and lower CPC. Careful attention to content will raise your ranking by making your pages more relevant to Google algorithms.

About 80 percent of search traffic lands on one of four types of pages:

• A business homepage
• A registration page
• A checkout page
• A product page

If your customers back-click because this is not what they are looking for, you just wasted CPC budget.

As if that is not a good enough reason to investigate where your customers are being taken, here are some others to consider when thinking about your landing pages:

1) Landing Pages Improve Your Quality Score with Google. High quality scores improve your overall cost per click and drive traffic to your site. Unlike home pages, landing pages improve your overall relevancy to your ads, raising your quality score. If your customers wind up on a registration page immediately, your quality score will also go down due to low conversion. Shopping carts are a no-no, as well, as customers may feel pressured. Many still believe if they see a shopping cart, they are automatically obligated to pay for items they have not yet decided upon. Product-specific pages are probably the least guilty of violating the quality score rule.

To raise your quality score with landing pages:

• Write original content and match it carefully to your search terms.
• Use a hierarchical form of organization.
• Use the tag and header tags for important content.
• Do not saturate your content with keywords.

2) Landing Pages Increase Your Conversion Rate. Landing pages are the most likely to give your conversion a lift since this is where customers enter your website. If you want to reach your browsers and turn them into customers, consider these points:

• Match your message. You have about five seconds to hook your customer. Give clear information immediately that shows them they are in the right place based on what they clicked.
• Focus your subject. Try to group your content so that customers can intuitively find a large category that they can then browse, rather than having a multitude of choices.
• Tell your story. Good sales strategy is about storytelling. Your customers want to hear your story, but only if you tell it in an engaging way. All good sales stories include a proposition, an overview, rich media, benefits, testimonials, and cues to guide your browsers to the proper sections. Finally, there should be a subtle call to action to inspire them to click-through.

3) Experiment. Do not be afraid to experiment. See what works and what does not, and do not expect what works to remain static. If your landing pages are not generating the traffic you want, try putting something different up.

If you want a higher return on your marketing investment, you have to be willing to do the homework that leads to better conversion rates and better sales. That means being flexible and open to changes in your web site. The use of landing pages is one step in that direction.

Orange County SEO can help you create the perfect landing pages for your business. Contact us today to see how we can increase your traffic and give your users a better experience.