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July 17, 2006 |
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By: Louise Rijk - Bio - Blog |
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Search Engine Marketing:
"Hybrid" Landing Pages for SEO and PPC
There was a time when pay per click (PPC) advertising stood as an alternative for businesses that did not have the expertise, resources and time to put into optimizing their web site for high rankings in the organic search listings at the major search engines. Search engine optimization (SEO) can be difficult to institute, and the results, when done properly, can sometimes take months to notice. When not done properly, it can actually hurt your existing rankings and online advertising budget. Compare this to the guarantees you get with pay per click - full control over ad text and near instant placement at the top of the results, so long as you are willing to bid high enough. However, the lines between organic search and pay per click are beginning to blur with Google's announcement that they are now grading your PPC ads based on the landing pages they point to.
Google Quality Score
For a while Google AdWords has had a leg up on other PPC ad networks due to the existence of their quality score. A good quality score, which is based on an ad's click-through rate, copy, and keyword performance, among other things, can lead to getting a higher placement in the PPC listings even when bidding lower than some of your competitors. However, that quality score is now including an analysis of the ads' landing pages as well. The Google AdWords spider crawls the landing pages of AdWords ads now, in what sounds very similar to how they crawl and rank their organic results as well.
Arbitrage Advertisers
Google's attempts to do this are for the purpose of improving the user experience and engagement. Many click arbitrage advertisers direct low cost pay per click AdWords traffic to MFA (Made for AdSense) pages and then make money on higher cost per click AdSense ads when a visitor clicks on those. These sites do nothing more than bring up contextual AdSense ads for the user to click on. This brings money to the MFA site, but waters down the user experience.
This is a major blow to some legitimate advertisers. Many have constructed PPC landing pages that may be image heavy or contain flash or other elements that do not rank well organically, but convert very well. Some advertisers may not have optimized their sites for organic rankings at all, counting on PPC traffic to fuel their sales and leads. They may now face a penalty that will bring their cost per click up for having a lower quality score. Many advertisers are growing frustrated with the continual need to update their sites, feeling forced by Google to conform to their vision of what makes a site relevant for the user, with little regard to what will get the user to convert.
Keyword Relevant "Hybrid" Landing Pages
In order to continue using Google AdWords as a part of you website marketing program, more care needs to be put into the copy writing and construction of your landing pages. In the past, separate PPC landing pages may have been constructed differently from content pages meant to rank well and bring in organic traffic. The best way is to create "hybrid" landing pages - pages that are constructed to both, rank well and convert well. That way pages will pass Google's examinations for keyword relevancy and not increase your PPC costs, and you will still pick up the conversions you need. For those constructing new sites, building "hybrid" landing pages may even lower cost, as only one page need be constructed rather than two (a hybrid page versus one organic content page and one PPC landing page).
In the end, if you want your search marketing campaign to be effective and return a positive ROI, you will need to balance both your organic and paid search efforts. Google is simply forcing people to do so by introducing the concepts of organic keyword relevancy into their pay per click guidelines.
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