Search marketing isn’t just about what goes on in Google Adwords or Yahoo/Bing. A truly sophisticated search marketing strategy includes more: consistency in online/offline branding, social media, content generation. But there’s one external aspect of search marketing that is inextricably tied to conversion rate and campaign success.

You’ve gotta have good landing pages.

It probably seems like sending traffic to your homepage is a good idea. After all, it’s the central hub for your whole website. It’s like your company’s directory. A visitor can go anywhere from here!

Well, exactly. A visitor can go anywhere – poke around, get lost, read some stuff, get distracted, float away, vanish for eternity…

If you have a search marketing campaign whose purpose is conversion – whether that’s a sale for you, or a download or completed form – you need to do everything you can to keep visitors focused.

Here’s another way to think about it. Search marketing is like a billboard or a television ad that sends visitors to your store. But if your store is a mess – if there is no one to greet customers, and they can’t find the product they want or figure out how to pay – you will lose sales. Brick-and-mortar stores spend a great deal of energy making sure the purchase process is easy and pleasant. You should be thinking the same way when you advertise online.

How to increase search marketing conversions by fixing up your landing pages:

  1. Don’t send traffic to your homepage.
  2. Each ad group needs its own landing page.
  3. Every keyword must be included in the copy on a given landing page. Your ad groups should be small and very thematically focused, so this isn’t as tricky as it sounds. When in doubt, borrow inspiration from the landing pages for your ads, and create ad groups from the ads.
  4. Whether your conversion is a sale, download or form completion, design is important. Have a single, big, clear call-to-action. Buttons draw the eye. And make sure the text on the button is descriptive. Try action phrases like “Try it Now!” “Get Started!” “Download the Whitepaper!” or the classic “Buy Now!”
  5. If your business is focused on lead generation, don’t offer navigation to the rest of the site. You can tell enough of your story on one page. Include a description, a testimonial, and a clear call-to-action: “Sign up Now”.
  6. If you have an e-commerce site with many products, send traffic to the page with the product you advertised. This is called “deep linking”. You don’t want a visitor to have to click around on your site to find the shoes they wanted.

Focusing on landing pages is a relatively minor solution that can take a so-so campaign and boost conversions significantly!