So today we’re answering a question submitted by someone asking about keywords in landing pages. How important are they? Where do you put them and does it really matter? Stay tuned.
Hi, I’m Mike Mancini with PPCVideoTraining.com. We had a question sent in by Greer. Now, Greer was asking us about where do you put the keywords and how important are they for your landing pages?
So Greer, to answer your question, Google WILL see your pages, whether or not you have keywords in the header text, whether you have them in the body, whatever it might be.
Optimize Your Landing Page
However, this gets more into optimization of the page in general. So if you just put up a page there and you don’t optimize it, chances are it’s not going to come up in the top organic rankings of good.
However, if it is a paid landing page, that’s a little bit differently because you can get actual landing pages that you create for your campaigns to rank rather well over time.
And the reason that that happens is if it’s done correctly, people will visit your page after they click on an ad, they will see what you’ve got. They’ll stay on the page. They’ll complete an action.
Google has all these signals and we actually have a landing pages that we’ve created for people that do rank really, really well over time. But those pages are optimized.
Ads Must Be Relevant To The Landing Page
So when you’re doing Google ads, it is important to put the keywords on your landing page and the reason being is once you submit that landing page to Google, Google sends its spiders over to your landing page and scans it and essentially says okay, this person has a keyword here that points, that somebody will type in, it will show the ad.
Is the ad relevant to the keyword? Then if somebody does click on your ad, they go to a landing page. Now, does that landing page match up for the ad?
So this is our agency page, Mancini Digital. If I was running ads for PPC management, which we do, or Google ads management or training, we do not bring people to this page.
Why? Because let’s say we’re running an ad for PPC management, this does not capture their attention at all. It does not talk about anything about PPC management right when this page loads.
Now if they scroll down a little bit, they can see that it does here, but this is really more just set up as our just main website. We do not run ads to the front page of our website under any circumstances. We will always create a specific landing page.
Now here is an older landing page that we’ve actually had some pretty good success with for PPC management. As you can see, pay per click, which obviously PPC stands for, then it talks about PPC management.
This is all in the header text. So this is all in an H1 text. We put that keyword in there so that it does tell Google hey, this is important for this page.
However, if we did not have this here, this is not going to destroy our page at all. We have run into so many different landing pages that other people have created that work rather well whether they have the keyword in the H1 tag or not.
As far as optimization goes, this is a best practice.
Sprinkle Keywords Throughout Your Landing Page
As you can see now in the copy, you can see we have PPC management here. We have pay per click, again, down here. We kind of will sprinkle the keywords throughout the page. But we want to make it readable.
Google is not going to just take a look at the keywords on our page and say hey, this is awesome. Google will rate your keywords in your Google ads account and give it what’s called a quality score.
Now, quality score is based on three things. One is the expected click through rate. How likely is it the ad will be clicked based on the keywords that you have chosen?
Number two is the ad relevance. How relevant is the ad that you’re showing to people to the keywords that you’re targeting?
If your keyword is red trucks and you’re talking in the ad only about blue cars, it’s not very irrelevant and Google’s going to kind of give you a little ding for that one.
Then the third thing is the landing page experience. Once somebody clicks on an ad, they get to your landing page. This is what they’re looking at.
How relevant is your landing page number one? If you’re talking about red cars in your ad, you should probably take people to a page about red cars. Make sense? But it’s really about the landing page experience.
So when somebody clicks an ad and gets to this landing page, Google is monitoring what’s happening. Are people just loading the page and clicking off right away because that’s obviously not going to be a very relevant landing page and Google is going to measure that.
Are they scrolling down the page? That is something a lot of people don’t realize that Google measures as well. The further they scroll down the page, the better.
And it doesn’t have to do with how long the page is, it just matters how far they get down. So let’s say the pages five screens long, if somebody gets to two and a half screens, obviously it’d be 50%.
So it’s really great, relevant information, more people will scroll down and read the information. The other thing is how long are they on the page?
Are they on here and reading and taking advantage of what’s on here? And then the other one is are they taking action? Are they clicking on the phone numbers? Are they filling out the forms?
Because the minute you take action, Google measures that as well.
Target The Customer’s Need
That’s really the biggest thing that Google cares about is is the landing page experience good for the user. Once that starts to happen, you will start to see your cost per click go down.
And the reason being Google wants to give people the information they’re looking for when they search it. Because if you go to Google and you type in blue cars and you get to a page about red trucks, you click off immediately.
And if that keeps happening for every time you go to Google and check on an ad or check out a service or whatever it might be, if you’re not finding what you’re looking for, you’re not going to use Google anymore.
They understand that and they obviously make most of their money from this business, so they want you to have the best experience possible.
So you need to make sure that when you’re building your campaigns, you can give the person who clicks on it the best experience possible.
Make sure you take them to a relevant landing page. So keywords are crucial because if they type in PPC management, that is one of the first things we want them to see.
We want them to see that keyword that they typed in specifically to get their attention. You have less than three seconds to get someone’s attention once they hit this page.
If they see the term that they typed in, chances are they’re going to have a better experience. It’s going to catch their attention. They’re like oh, this is what we typed in. Let’s keep reading.
Once again, it keeps them on the page, gets them to scroll, gets them to take an action.
So I know that was a very long winded answer to your question about relevance of keywords on landing pages. But keywords are just a piece of it.
You want the keywords on there to capture someone’s attention, but you also want the person who is clicking on there to have a good experience and that is the most important thing.
All right, I hope that helps. If you liked the video, please do me a favor and hit the subscribe button below and you’ll be notified of new videos that we released each and every week.
Otherwise, if you enjoyed this video, go ahead and look on the right hand side. You’ll see another video about how we actually create our landing pages.
So thanks so much for watching. If you happen to know someone who’s in need of PPC or Google ad services, please let us know. We’d love to help. Hope to see you again next time.
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