Boost your landing page conversions in five simple steps
by Heather Lloyd-Martin
(Jim Banks, President of the UK firm Web Diversity wrote a great article for me last year about using Google AdWords for PPC testing purposes. I highly recommend reading his informative interview in my Writing for Spidering Search Engines guide):
Some landing page testing basics are:
- Write two (or more) keyphrase-rich landing pages. These pages should be keyphrase and information-rich, utilizing trusted SEO writing techniques. (Need an SEO writing primer? Check out our Successful SEO copywriting guide).
- Post your test pages on your site. Remember, you do not want test pages to be spidered (yet) so robots.txt these pages so the search engines won't index them.
- For each AdWords ad concept, point to a different test landing page. Maybe you have one ad promoting the same product/service - and the only difference between the ads is your landing page URL (that is, you're sending visitors to an appropriate test page). That's OK - this allows you to track and test landing page conversions. (It's also a good idea to test multiple variations of your ad copy as well - see the resource list for more information.)
- Watch your hits and site conversions. You'll typically see that one page will outperform the others - and this is the page you want to integrate into your site. If two pages have fairly close conversion rates, keep testing - or go immediately to Guesstimating Your Google Rankings.
- When you've found your perfect page - post it on your site (and don't forget to delete your test pages). Congratulations - you have a top-converting page!
(Yes, this technique does work in Overture, as well. However, Overture editors need to approve every ad and landing- page combination - and this does take time. For fast intelligence, AdWords provides immediate results without the editorial control lag. If you have a longer test cycle, Overture is great - and you'll still be gaining targeted traffic.)
Worried that your conversion-based page won't position well in the engines? Again, you can use paid search engines for qualified testing.