SEO for PPC

A lot is said about Landing Pages and their layout, where forms should go, what should be above & below the fold, what your "call to action" should look like and where it should be. This process is important for converting visitors, but many AdWords advertisers prioritise landing page layout over content and it's the content that can cost you, a high conversion rate is only good if you receive traffic.

Google AdWords will crawl your landing page in the same way that it would crawl your website for organic listings, testing content relevancy, coding and load speed. This process is aimed at providing paid-search visitors with the same level of relevancy they could expect from the natural listings.

To quickly explain the process, Google looks at your keyword, Adtext and landing page and compares the relevancy of all three, making an estimation of visitor experience and applying an overall score, known as the "Quality Score."

Google describes the Quality score as follows: "The AdWords system calculates a 'Quality Score' for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user's search query. A keyword's Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC)."

Those advertisers that spent ages designing, building and perfecting the look of their landing page at the cost of optimisation and content will find that their keywords receive very low quality scores and as such, high CPC's and less traffic than desired.

For the purposes of this post I will assume you know how to build an optimal PPC campaign and concentrate on the Landing Page optimisation.

Starting at the top and working downwards:

Page Title:
It is recognised that Google generally indexes 65 characters of a page title, and when it comes to AdWords it is beneficial to utilise this space to give the crawler its first indication of what this landing page is about.

Choose keywords from your AdGroup that you favour and construct a page title containing those keywords.

Example: If your keywords and Adtext are focussed on X-Box Consoles and your Landing page content is focussed on selling X-Box Consoles, don't use a Page title like "Bill's Electronics - Selling the latest electrical goods" Get X-Box keywords in there in a natural way (Don't just put a load of keywords in a string, make it a readable title).

Meta Description:
The Meta Description is not seen by AdWords visitors, but it is crawled and may add a tiny bit of weight to relevancy. Make sure that you utilise the 152 characters available, to produce a natural sounding page description continuing the theme of the product and including keywords.

Meta Keywords:
It is widely accepted that Meta Keywords do not carry weight from an SEO angle but again, they get crawled and if they add anything at all to the relevancy of your PPC landing page it is worth the moment of effort it requires. DO NOT keyword stuff here, simply choose some of your short-tail, broader keywords and add a small selection to the Meta keywords tag.

Headers:
<h> tags carry a decent amount of weight when it comes to page relevancy, so make sure that your headlines include a sought after keyword in a natural way that will make sense to visitors.

Text Style Tags:
Tags that embolden your text, such as <b> and <strong> and also <i> or <em> which make text italic, should be used to place emphasis on a selection of keywords. This brings emphasis to the reader but also the crawler. Important: Use this sparingly, relevantly and don't overdo it, the reader is important and placing emphasis on every other word will likely drive them elsewhere.

Image Alt Tags
"Img Alt's" should contain chosen keywords as well. Alt's are often overlooked when optimising a page, placing keywords into "Image Alt's" simply re-enforces the relevancy of the landing page in relation to its keywords.

Code to Text ratio:
The "code to text ratio" of a landing page is very important as Google needs to see that you are presenting enough information to visitors, but also that you are presenting that information in an optimal manner. General consenus is that a "code to text ratio" of around 25% is optimal for crawlers so getting as close to this number as realistically possible will help with optimisation efforts. There are various tools available on the web that will tell you your code to text ratio.

Site Inclusion:
Google Crawlers will probe links from your landing page to make sure you are not simply linking to alternative sites that are not relevant to the landing page. Try to make sure that your top-level navigation is included. A way to do this without distracting users from the content or design features is to add text links below the fold. If you feel that this approach damages your design, links to your homepage, sitemap, privacy policy, terms & conditions and contact us in the footer of the landing page should suffice.

Page Load Speed:
The speed at which your page loads has a significant effect on quality scores. Google is of the belief that clicking through from the search engine results pages (SERP's) should be as quick as flicking a page in a magazine. If your website does not provide this user experience, you are going to get penalised for it.

Use of multiple images and flash movies will slow a page as they take time to load, so make sure you're not going too overboard with your design.

Again, there are various 3rd party tools available to check page load speeds, so check it out and if you're hitting over 3 seconds it may be time to trim your page a little.

Summary
There are many other factors that affect quality score and this guide will not guarantee 10/10 for every keyword, but getting the above right will go a long way to improving the performance of an AdWords campaign.

The quest for high quality scores requires work and attention to detail but creating a quality PPC campaign and an optimal landing page will cover off visitors, leaving you to focus on conversions.