Landing pages PPC optimisation. Why are landing pages important?
After clicking on an advert, it takes a user on average 2.3 seconds to decide if they will stay on the page or exit back to where they came from.
Your landing pages need to be optimised to ensure that when a user clicks your ad or comes across your page, they see exactly what they’re looking for.
Ensure your landing pages are up to scratch by using a PPC agency in London to audit your website and recommend changes that need to be made. This can include optimising for your customer’s specific conversion journey, creating new on-page content that maximises conversions, or addressing technical SEO issues that might compromise user experience.
Matching Landing Pages To The User
Google’s goal is to match online users with exactly what they were searching for. They use ‘spiders’ to crawl over landing pages to see if the content is relevant and manual reviewers who scan landing pages to give them a quality score.
This quality score can affect how well your ads perform because if Google deems your landing page as low quality, it may be less likely to serve your ad, putting higher quality pages above yours. A PPC agency will be able to check and monitor this score for you and make any changes, or in other words, optimise your landing page to improve your ads performance.
It’s impossible to talk about Google ads without mentioning keywords. Of course, your landing page must be optimised with the keywords in your ad to convince Google that your site is highly relevant to the keywords that your paid campaigns are targeting.
Text with the SEO attribute of Heading 1 should consist of the main keyword in your Google ads. Why? Because Heading 1 is where the primary authority of the page, in Google’s eyes, comes from. It determines the page’s content and how relevant it is to the copy in your PPC ad.
Therefore, ensuring that your keyword is dispersed on your landing page and relevant long-tailed keywords is imperative to boost your quality score and match customer intent with the information, products, or services you’re providing.
Convincing the user to stay
Getting the user to click on the ad is one thing, but how can the landing page be optimised to make them stay?
Your page must have a quick loading time, or the user might grow impatient and click off. This loading time can be longer than 3 seconds, so any large images, videos, or animations that might slow the loading speed need to be adjusted for shorter content.
Any relevant information that the user is likely to be looking for should be above the fold where they can see it straight away, with further details below the fold should they decide to scroll down to read more.
On average, for every ten users that reach a landing page, only two scroll down to read the copy on the page, so the headlines need to capture the reader’s attention to encourage them to scroll down.
The information provided above the fold should be short, snappy and easy to read. Putting relevant information, including keywords, into bullet points can be an effective way for the user to quickly decide if they have found what they are looking for. It also shows spiders and manual reviewers that you are providing the right amount of information when necessary.
There should be at least 500 words of content on the landing page to adhere to SEO best practices. However, authoritative content such as the homepage and in-depth articles or blogs should be closer to 1000 words.
So, while only 20% of users will scroll down actually to read the content, it’s still essential for it to be there and be high quality for the benefit of the spiders and, in turn, your quality score. Writing this long-form copy can be time-consuming, sometimes tedious, for business owners, but this is something PPC agencies have plenty of experience with.
Using a PPC copywriter means that your landing page content will be optimised for keywords and of high quality.
Getting the user to perform an action
Ultimately, if a user carries out an action while on the landing page, whether a purchase, filling out a lead form, or watching a video, your landing page has served its purpose.
Therefore, making this process as simple and easy as possible is perhaps the most essential part of your landing page optimisation. This is also known as Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO). It means optimising the function and format of your landing page to make the conversion journey as easy as possible for the user.
Call To Actions (CTAs) in the right place, with the relevant information to help a user convert, are essential. But it’s more than just having a button placed ergonomically on the page – your user’s conversion journey will differ depending on what action you want. This means that working with a PPC agency can often help you identify the best format for your page and how best to get users to perform the action you require.
Having your CTA further down the page, or worse, on a different page entirely, makes it hard for the user to perform the desired action and spoils the excellent work that your ad has done to get the user on the page.
It’s also important to remember that most of your traffic nowadays will be on mobile, so when optimising your landing page. Make sure to check that your landing page is not compromised in any way for mobile users and that it’s still easy to complete the desired action.
It’s not enough to just have strong ads; if users click on your ads and then click off in just a few seconds, consider why this might be.
Do you have any large images or videos on your landing page? Is the information relevant and easy to read? Does it include keywords?
It’s time to review your landing pages and optimise them for PPC ads, so you can finally start spending your money effectively and see conversions flourish as a result.