Optimizing your website for Google won’t just boost your search visibility. You’ll also create a site that’s more Google AdWords friendly and, as a result, attract more clients via pay per click advertising. A great PPC campaign should always be accompanied by a stellar website. Your landing page quality can seriously affect your Google AdWords quality score, and even if you pour money into your advertising campaign, it will be difficult to see positive results with a weak customer experience on your site.
So how do you create a website that will propel you into Google’s top search results and generate positive feedback about your company? Here are 4 rules you should be following:
Quality Content Is Key
Paid search is a complicated and evolving art and science, so rather than focusing on specific algorithmic tweaks, “we encourage you to focus on delivering the best possible experience for users,” says the Google team.
Google tells you its secret right there. Create a landing page to compliment your PPC campaign that potential customers find useful. It seems like common sense, but it really is the easiest way to enhance your PPC campaign and help customers remember your website. In every step of building your website, ask yourself if it’s easy to navigate, helpful and pleasing to the eye.
The goal is to create an information-rich site with pages that clearly and accurately describe your content. This will help your PPC campaign by increasing your quality score. A higher quality score means higher advertisement placement at a lower cost-per-click. That, combined with a website people can’t resist buying from, and you’re in business.
Stay Up To Date
Not only should the content on your website be high quality, but it should also be fresh. The two go hand-in-hand. Your quality content cannot be of the highest standard if it’s old news, and users tend to prefer sites with more recent dates when searching on Google.
If you’ve put the effort into creating a great PPC campaign, don’t waste your time and money with an outdated landing page once a potential customer clicks on your advertisement.
Put Yourself In Your Customer’s Shoes
In both your Google AdWords campaign and your website, think about your potential client. What words would they most likely search to find your company? How can you make it easy for them to find you?
Choosing keywords for your PPC campaign is an important process, and one that has a strong effect on the success of your business.
Once you choose keywords for your PPC campaign, make sure your website has those words in it. Use corresponding descriptive titles and ALT tags as well. A PPC management company with trained Google AdWords experts can help you design a website that corresponds with your PPC campaign.
Link Issues
Link-building can complement your PPC campaign and help direct traffic to your website by making your brand popular with Internet users. You want people to link to your site, so promote your company any way you can.
Unnatural or artificial links are links that manipulate your website’s rank in search results. Whether paid or created by spammers, these links are unacceptable in Google’s eyes. Over the past year Google has begun to send out warnings to sites with unnatural links. If you receive one of these emails, act on it immediately.
Google penalizes sites with unnatural links and lowers your ranking in organic search results. This is bad news for any website, but especially if you’re running a PPC campaign. Unnatural links will lower your quality score and your ranking on Google, so you’ll be paying for a wasted campaign.
Instead, focus on building natural links from similar businesses, partner organizations and loyal customers and you’ll keep Google happy–and that’s always good news for your website.
David Chapman is a Google AdWords certified expert and a specialist in all online marketing aspects related to Google and pay per click advertising.
Image via DonkeyHotey via Flickr CC
