Best practices for building a perfect landing page for SEO and PPC

2019 is set to be the first year where over half of the world’s population accesses the Internet.¹ With trillions of searches taking place every year, the value of investing in SEO optimisation and PPC advertising campaigns remains high.

But where are you sending those people who find you via search? Many brands will focus traffic towards capturing leads, but around 61% of businesses consider traffic and lead generation as the biggest challenge.²

So where do we start? A great PPC campaign includes:

• An optimised title
• An alluring meta description
• A highly optimized landing page

Generating high quality leads takes effort, but a super-optimised landing page can help do a lot of the lifting for you. A PPC training course will help you know how to build a landing page. But in the meantime, we will reveal some of the great tweaks that you can make to your landing page to raise your conversion rate.

1) Do what you say on the tin

There should be a strong connection between your landing page title and your advertisement title. The visitors that you get from paid search are highly targeted audience and are looking for a specific thing from the service providers or a product seller. When they search for a cruise holiday to the Caribbean, they are not likely to be interested in a canal boat holiday in Europe.

If you are running your PPC campaign for a keyword, such as “Facebook Ad Course for Beginners,” you must ensure that the title of your landing page has a strong connection to that keyword.

The appropriate title for the keyword “Facebook Ad Course for Beginners: “How I got Started with Facebook Ads with Zero Marketing and Tech Experience.”

A vague title for the keyword “Facebook Ad Course for Beginners.” “How I ran a remarketing Campaign on Facebook.”

The first thing that your visitors will notice on your landing page is the headline. You cannot expect a landing page to perform well without an alluring headline that has a strong connection to the keyword that you are running a PPC campaign for.

2) Have an ultra-specific goal for your PPC campaign

It is impossible to create a well-performing landing page without having a specific purpose in mind. When deciding the purpose of your PPC marketing campaign, try to avoid vague goals like, “increasing sales”. Aim for something more specific.

An example of a vague goal:

“I want to increase car sales with my PPC campaign.”

An example of an ultra-specific landing page goal:

“I want to get at least 5000 test drive booking for our newest vehicle.”

The second statement has a clear objective. It will focus your search for statistics, studies, and consumer behavior of people who might be interested in test driving a specific vehicle.

It is not a good practice to rely on a single vague landing page for a wide range of products. You should have specific landing pages for different products and services.

3) Why are people searching?

Understanding your audience is important, but to really get excellent results, take this a step further by understanding why they are searching for your product or services.

Some searchers want an immediate result, but some searchers are only looking to get some education. There is a different buying cycle, according to the product, service, or individual buyer needs.

In the example below Gartner, a global research and advisory firm, is giving away an eBook for free. This will help solidify them as a reliable, useful source of insight. Companies don’t make snap decisions when it comes to investing in analysts and research firms, but by building up their reputation Gartner will be at the forefront of their readers’ minds when they the time comes.

However, a pest control company should not design a landing page for educating their audience about various types of PEST. The searchers’ intention is entirely different in this case.

In the above landing page, we can see that the pest control company is giving users exactly what they want. The searchers do not care about pest education; they want an immediate solution. There is a contact number and a short form to fill for visitors who want immediate solutions.

4) Optimize your landing page for a mobile phone with a clear call-to-action button

Due to increased mobile phone usage, Google is putting a lot of emphasis on mobile user experience. Every single page of your website must be optimised for a smartphone, and that includes your landing pages.

There is a good chance that your visitor will quickly close your landing page if they have an unpleasant mobile experience. Maybe they find the text too small, or the title awkwardly fills up the whole screen. Maybe you have links close together, a nightmare for chunkier fingers. You will then waste a considerable sum of your PPC budget, and your opportunity cost will skyrocket.

You can use tools such as Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to help you optimise your landing page for mobile phones. The modern landing page creator also has features that can help you with mobile optimisation.

5) Keep on testing

Testing is critical when it comes to crafting a compelling call to action. You must split test your headline, copy, and length of the text. After performing tests, you will know what is working and what is not working for your business.

Fantastic platforms such as Crazyegg, Optimizely, and AB Tasty enable you to test different iterations of your website and specific pages. You can also get recommendations on what to do to improve performance.

6) Track all conversions

How do your assess the performance of your landing pages? Are you expecting people to purchase, call, or fill out a form? Whatever you’re aiming for, and however you’re offering it, you need to know what’s worked.

If you’d like people to call you from your landing pages, for luxury, enterprise, customised, or high value orders, then you need to know which page they called from and how they got there. This is entirely possible with call tracking, start a conversation with us today to find out how you could benefit.

Over to You

When optimising your landing pages, it’s best to create a checklist and include the best practices that have produced results for you. Keep checks on what is working, and iteratively improve these key touchpoints.

This was a guest post written in collaboration with Webdew.

References:

1) Worldwide Internet user penetration for 2014-2021, Statista, (2019)
2) 2018 Marketing Statistics, Trends & Data, Hubspot, (2018)