I’ve tired of beating my head over the wall with incompetent real estate agents who totally dropped the ball in renting out my beautiful condo in Boston.
So I’m doing it internet marketing style! 
Check it out:
This is where I used to live, before I moved into my luxury loft in heart of the city.
Here’s a youtube video of the place as well:
Over this last weekend, some Adwords users have received a warning email from Google stating that their landing pages are of poor quality and do not comply with Google’s landing page and site quality guidelines.
Some users have already been banned outright.
Here’s an automated response from one user who queried the ban:
As the email you received on Friday explained, your account has been suspended due to multiple submissions of poor quality landing pages. We are unable to revoke your account suspension, and we will not accept advertisements from you in the future
Check out the discussions at Webmasterworld and the Google AdWords Forum. Has there been a change in quality standards? Perhaps a harder enforcement of a previously lax rule?
Naturally, webmasters are irate. There appears to be no official comment from Google, but we’ll keep you posted.
In the meantime, let’s take a look at Google landing page quality standards.
Google introduced a quality score back in 2005. This quality score covered various data points, including the ad text and click through rates, and helps ensure the user finds what they’re look for.
Soon after, Google added a landing page score to the mix.
This score evaluated the landing page in terms of relevance i.e. the page should reflect the promise made by the ad.
The text also must be original, so that users aren’t seeing the exact same landing page if they click on different ads. There should not be excessive pop-ups, or any means to “trap” the user i.e. disabling the back button.
In many ways, these policies mirror the type of sites Google ranks in the organic serps, relevancy to the keyword term being the primary requirement.
Here are Google’s official landing page standards.
Now, Google uses an automated bot to determine compliance, yet Google doesn’t provide a means for webmasters to test their pages, presumably because they want to keep their scoring mechanisms a secret.
Dave Davis has an excellent tutorial on SearchEngineJournal.
Check out W3 Semantic Extractor and the Google site related keyword tool. What better way to get information about what Google thinks your site is about then using a tool designed by Google to figure out exactly what your site is about?
In summary, you need to ensure your page contains the same or similar terms as appear in the Adwords ad, and these terms need to be displayed prominently on your landing page in order to comply in terms of relevance.
If you go one step further and test your pages using the site related keyword tool, and the semantic extractor, you stand a good chance of achieving a high quality score.
Google, as usual, require you to read between the lines. Let’s examine some of their guidelines more closely:
Link to the page on your site that provides the most useful and accurate information about the product or service in your ad.
Ensure the landing page and the ad are identical in terms of subject matter. Click-backs can affect your quality score, so make sure you repeat the keyword term high up on the page, in bold, in your copy. This also helps reaffirm to the user that they’ve arrived at the right place.
If your site displays advertising, distinguish sponsored links from the rest of your site content
Your page can’t consist mostly of ads. I’ve seen a lot of pages getting away with this, however.
Try to provide information without requiring users to register. Or, provide a preview of what users will get by registering
Pretty obvious. Users typically don’t register for something unless they desperately want what you’re offering. There is a high likelihood they’ll click back if presented with registration as the only option.
In general, build pages that provide substantial and useful information to the end-user
That’s a big one. Google don’t want just an ad, and certainly not a misleading one. They want information, much the same as they require in the SERPS. Focus on providing user utility and you can’t go to far wrong.
If your landing page consists of mostly ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalog page), you should provide as much information as you can beyond what your ad describes. For example, if your ad mentions <’Free travel information,’ your landing page should feature free travel information (versus links to other sites that do).
Your page should be an informative destination in itself. Of course, you need to balance the commercial imperative – making a conversion – with an informational one.
You should have unique content (should not be similar or nearly identical in appearance to another site). For more information, see our affiliate guidelines.
As mentioned, earlier, Google will want to avoid showing the same page to users if they happen to click multiple ads. It’s not hard for Google to spot duplicate content, so make sure your text is original.
To avoid duplication, consider various angles. i.e. instead of talking about the product itself, provide a “how to solve a problem” page. This how-to, of course, will recommend the product in question. Tell a story about using the product, provide unique testimonials, etc. Avoid cutting and pasting from the suppliers website.
Finally, a lot of the emails concerning the banning appear to have been sent to affiliates, both direct-to merchant and otherwise. There are some big spenders in there, so it looks like Google is tightening the noose on the middle man, once again.
It’s easy to understand the frustration, given the vagueness, and neatly summed up by a WebmasterWorld poster:
You buy a laptop for $1K from HP,DELL, or IBM. This laptop has much lower margins than sending a few bytes over the wire. Yet, if you have a problem you expect, and you will be able, to contact someone in support via toll-free phone, live chat or email to resolve the problem. If the result is not satisfactory, you can get the problem escalated to a case manager or eventually executive support. At some point someone with sufficient *authority* to fix your particular problem will respond.
But, if you spend $100K on ads, the best you can get is a vague automated email.
Heh. Makes you wonder what some of these pages look like? Anyone got an example of a banned page?
A few months back I had a chat with ShoeMoney and we talked about a lot of marketing stuff. He always speaks of the importance of being able to leverage success to build other related projects. It is typically worth far more money to be a lead player with projects that build off of each other than it is to be a #10 player in many different markets trying to build disconnected brands that can't feed off each other. Even traditional slow moving publishing organizations like newspapers are aggressively leveraging network effects in their SEO strategy.
When you look at Theme Forest they came late to the market, and yet are many times as large as competing businesses that are twice as old. Envato was launched in 2006, and in spite of coming late to market they were nearly instantly successful. Owning popular blogs helped them create thriving marketplaces, and the marketplaces help them make the blogs more popular. The promotion is circular.
Larger web networks like IAC, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, Internet Brands, Quinstreet, Expedia, Classified Ventures, BankRate, Monster.com, and Demand Media employ the same tactics. At $170 million Mint was a cheap buy for Intuit just to block out competition. Any additional distribution and cost savings are a bonus. Once you have distribution you have free inventory to promote a new site into a related vertical. And this strategy works with smaller niche sites as well. Publishing this site made it easy for us to get a lot of exposure for my wife's PPC strategy flowchart.
Everything that is free is subsidized. And rather than trying to squeeze the maximum returns out of any given project it is often better to look for ways to add more value. The best businesses that are sustainable create more value than they capture. Once you have multiple monetization models and multiple income streams you can be flexible with your approach to growth.
We originally gave away free SEO tools mainly with the ideas of building links and promotion in mind. But now they also help establish a customer funnel while commoditizing the value of some similar business models. And because many of the tools are decentralized (as Firefox extensions) maintenance costs are much lower than someone who centralizes everything. Our customers on average tend to be toward the more sophisticated end of the spectrum, so giving away useful and extensible tools helps us meet that market. But a lot of our business strategy has been made up as we went along, rather than having an aggressive master plan in place.
Some companies are driven by big goals and 5 (and 10) year plans. Adobe bought Omniture and plans on offering deep analytics into user interactions with flash widget ads. Out of nowhere Adobe entered the ad market.
As Seth Godin highlighted, marketing has moved from renting an audience to building one:
This might be the most subtle yet important shift that marketers face as they deal with the reality of new media. Marketers aren't renters, now they own.
For generations, marketers were trained to buy (actually rent) eyeballs.
...
Suddenly the new media comes along and the rules are different. You're not renting an audience, you're building one.
One of the best companies to study from the perspective of using market leverage to enter new markets is Google. Recently they struck a deal with Warner to bring their music back to Youtube. But even while their music was not on Youtube I was still able to listen to it - on Youtube ;)
Want to try Google's newest software in Microsoft's Internet Explorer? Continue at your own Peril!
Google is constantly trying to extend search. And their 4 step process to entering a new market usually consists of...
One of the more cynical, but perhaps accurate, in depth research reports on Google's use of market leverage is Scott Cleland's Googleopoly [PDF]. You might not be able to apply every idea in there to your projects, but it should help you understand where Google intends to intersect with your market and how you can leverage some of those touch-points to your advantage.
One last tip, from Larry Ellison, "Pick your competitors carefully for you will quickly come to resemble the companies you compete with."
Top Intersection: Most of these people are not available for traditional client consulting projects because they simply lack the time needed to do them and run many successful projects of their own.
Right Intersection: The person who is available and under-priced quickly gets overworked. I have experienced this with multiple contractors in other fields where they would offer killer services and be surprisingly affordable and fast...and then on the next project they would disappear.
The guy who made the logo for SEO Book back in early 2004 was probably the most talented and most unreliable logo designer I have ever worked with. Sometimes he would be fast, sometimes he would be slow, and sometimes I would pay him and get no response. I wanted the guy to become more successful and reliable so much so that I offered him tons of free marketing so long as he would be available for the boatload of work I was going to send him. He said sure. Before beginning that marketing campaign I asked him if he was ready and got no response. ;)
And last year there was a designer/developer that had amazing skills. We hired him full time and it took him 2 months to make a website design. There are a lot of people in the world who are talented at what they do, but just are not skilled at business and/or do not approach their business like a business.
Left Intersection: There are lots of people who are good at sales who have no substance. If an SEO firm contacts you out of the blue (via tele-spamming or email spam) that is a good hint that they have more salesmen on staff than they have practitioners. If SEO is bolted on as a package for cheap then it is usually a scam.
It is nearly impossible to have enough time to study a fast changing craft, brand yourself as an expert in the space, and yet still find time available for doing consulting. It is not hard to do any 2 of the 3...but all 3 is brutally tough. In consulting so long as you have popularity you do not need much knowledge, as some well known SEOs have proved. But knowledge without popularity can be hard to monetize effectively.
Even if you are pretty decent at sales and have a strong brand it is hard to make an SEO services business model scale without watering it down. And watering down is rarely a solution because it leads to churn.
In the past I historically set my prices too low. Some of that was due to starting out with a low self-esteem, but just as much of it was due to not appreciating the actual value of what I was delivering. Because I could do something cheap I had no problem doing so, even if my pricing was well below the value delivered. Another thing that caused me to charge too little was a distaste for traditional salesmanship techniques (a difficult hang-up if you are a marketer!)
Where I learned how off my pricing was is when I reviewed work done by some competing firms for 5 figure sums. Some of which was of far less value than what I was offering in my $79 ebook. Well that made me feel a bit like an idiot.
I think when a person is new to a field it makes sense to set prices somewhat low so you can...
Setting prices a bit too low helps subsidize creating other pieces of your sales strategy...whereas if you set prices way above market expectations you won't get sales or market feedback.
But typically discounting should be done for a short period of time, only as something that is given as a reward for being fast acting. If you frequently discount you just lower the perceived quality and value of your product. And while you think you might be giving someone a good deal by discounting you have to look at it in the broader perspective. Offer a lower price and the customer...
all the while you...
Really the whole set up to discounting is quite stupid.
In a world where traditional advertising is losing efficacy, offering something free that helps gain mindshare and establish a relationship is smart. But free does have limitations. One of the biggest limitations is a sense of entitlement. If a person is a non-paying customer they are not a customer. You have to assume their complaints are worth $0. You owe them nothing and they should be thankful for whatever valuable tools and services you offer for free.
After you get enough momentum it makes sense to erect barriers to entry so you can gain value while giving it away. Rarely do one way exchanges build lasting value. If 1,000's of non-paying users are sending you emails asking questions then they are noise that must be filtered through ... a non-trivial cost.
The hard part is that it feeds the ego when you give stuff away and help people out. You think that you help so many people and that lots of people care for you. Put any barrier in their path and you will see how selfish and worthless many of those people are though. Every barrier brings about some level of hate from the most ignorant, greediest, and least appreciate members of the crowd. But if you get something like this you can't respect the sender:
This is crap. Every download link goes back to the same page. Like how are you suppose to download the tool if there's a download link which say #.
Instead of spending time collecting peoples emails and spamming them you should try more in giving better product and easier way to access them.
I like your tools, but it was easy last year to use them, now it's a waste of time. If this system keeps on getting more slower and I've to go through more registering then using I'm better off using something which is less good but instantaneous, which was your product, but it's not anymore.
So I hope you start easying out the process of installing your tools or you'll start loosing your customers.
So that person...
As far as my business interests go, that person is worth less than nothing. If they are still breathing, it is no doubt a waste of oxygen.
Would I rather spend my time helping out that ungrateful USER, or would that time be better spent spending it with someone who loves me and cares for me?
Now some people have a tough break and sometimes it is worth helping them out. But in most cases a lack of resources is simply caused by a lack of resourcefulness. And, since change comes from within, if you try to help those kinds of people out they are far more likely to pull you down than you are to lift them up.
Recently a person asked me via a blog comment what they should do if they are smart but can't afford a conference ticket and know nobody. The frame of that question is one which is lacking in resourcefulness. When I was new to the SEO industry part of why I got known was because I syndicated content to other sites, participated in some online forums, moderated some online forums, and blogged day in and day out. I further spent tons of money giving away free software, which some people appreciate ;)
And even when I was less known, had no money, knew nobody, etc. I did not see those as obstacles. They were opportunities. Since I lacked capital I could leverage my time as an undervalued resource until the market started to value it more. I got a job to create cashflow, spent everything I could on learning + networking, helped organize a conference in exchange for a free pass to go to it, and out of the process the only thing I regret is that I didn't savor obscurity as much as I should have. :D
SEO came about soon after the advent of the web crawler. The commercial imperative was obvious - where there was web traffic, there was money to be made. Positioning a page first in the engines was pretty much a licence to print money.
Still is, of course.
Throughout the history of search and SEO, the predominant metaphor of the web has been one borrowed partly from publishing - the page - and partly from computer science - the domain. A domain contains pages. A domain is a silo. A domain has clear borders.
Search forces quite a different metaphor on the web.
Search is a connector between a person and a page. Search subverts the domain structure because the visitor can dive in at the page level. In this respect, all pages become a part of the much bigger silo. In 2009, that silo is Google.
Search also strives to be the ultimate answer engine - the mind of God. Got a question? Google it. Google will provide the answers.
But search is not quite there yet. Search still returns pages - the user still digs through the page to find the answer.
But for how long?
Consider social media. Is a page the basic unit of Twitter? No, it's the sentence. How about Youtube? The video. Social networks? The person. All can be extracted, re-purposed and dis-intermediated without losing meaning.
Consider the semantic web:
Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Finnish word for "monkey", reserving a library book, and searching for a low price for a DVD. However, acomputer cannot accomplish the same tasks without human direction because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing, and combining information on the web
What happens when the machine "understands" the query enough to provide a direct answer to a question, as opposed to returning a list of pages?
In a recent Techcrunch interview, Eric Schmidt said something rather telling:
So I don't know how to characterize the next 10 years except to say that we'll get to the point - the long-term goal is to be able to give you one answer, which is exactly the right answer over time.
Perhaps he was quoted out of context, but that strikes me as an absurd thing to say. As if there is ever one "right" answer. Well, I guess there is if you live in some Orwellian nightmare.
More importantly, if this is where Google intend to be in ten years time, then where does this leave content producers? If Google provides "the answer", why would anyone click-thru and visit a page? Conversely, why would anyone let Google crawl their content if Google's aim is to disintermediate the producer from their content? Johnon had an excellent post on this topic.
Recently, Google released rich snippets, a feature whereby you markup you data to suit Google's display criteria.
Rich Snippets give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance.
If the answer is "rich" enough, I guess the user doesn't even need to visit your page. Perhaps the user will get distracted by the Adwords listings, instead ;)
If Google aims to extract information and keep the visitor on Google, rather than just acting as a conduit between visitor and page, then this does not bode well for content producers.
This brings up the burning "Newspaper vs Google" argument. "How", the newspapers argue, "can we make money if Google undermines our revenue model? Ultimately, this is a question all content producers must face. Just ask those in the music industry.
Seemingly in response, Google is planning to roll out micropayments in the next year:
Google is planning to roll out a system of micropayments within the next year and hopes that newspapers will use it as they look for new ways to charge users for their content.
The question is, will micropayments and web advertising be enough to pay the bills, especially when it comes to expensive, high-risk media production, such as television and movies:
Grade’s criticisms were echoed in October by C4 chief executive Andy Duncan, who said Google had failed to invest in UK content creation. “Google takes more ad revenue out of the UK than ITV makes and it isn’t regulated. It isn’t fair [that] it’s not reinvesting that back into content and independent film production companies in the UK,” said Duncan.
Content producers are posting losses, whilst Google continues to post massive profits. What happens if content isn't worth producing anymore? What happens when revenue falls below the cost of production? Or perhaps content will still be economic, but only if production quality is sacrificed? Is it really just a case of fat media producers cutting bloated production costs?
What is Google's long term strategy as far as content producers are concerned? Besides PR fluffery, they never really say.
Of course, if content producers really did get disintermediated to the point where content production wasn't worth doing, Google may well collapse soon after. What would there be left to search? Wikipedia?
Where would the "answers" come from? Who would fund "answer provision"? Sufficient income must flow to the content producers, but the question still remains "how"?
And I don't really think the page is going away. The page has served humans well for thousands of years as a container of information. But if the information on pages can be aggregated in such a way that users don't need to visit the source page, where does this leave content producers? Where does this leave SEOs?
In 2009, SEO plays fall into three distinct categories.
The last model is, I'm guessing, is one a lot of SEOs will pursue. Many do so now.
Check this out:
Demand Media operates based on a simple formula for success on the Web: create a ton of niche, mostly uninspired content targeted to search engines, then make it viral through social software. Demand Media has been heavily funded to carry out that mission, to the tune of $355 million. So yes, brute force - quantity of content + money/power - works more often than we'd like to think on the Web.
The aggregator wields most of the power in this relationship, unless the publisher can lock in an audience who will by-pass the aggregator.
On the flip-side, John Battelle argued a few years back that search dis-intermediation is overrated.
Those who fear disintermediation should in fact be afraid of irrelevance -- disintermediation is just another way of saying that you've become irrelevant to your customers. It doesn't mean there isn't a customer, or middlemen of some sort who service that customer, or that the core proposition of your business has disappeared. It just means you're in a bit of a rut, and as much as you might pine for the past, it's probably time to rethink things before it's too late.
He reasons that writers can go outside the traditional silos:
And what of the role of publisher or content creator? Increasingly, those who have the ability to create great media can get pretty far without attaching themselves to the traditional indentured servitude of a publisher, label or network. Writers, for example, are finding their own voices outside the strictures of magazines and newspaper publishers. Blogs like Boing Boing, Daily Kos and Cool Tools are drawing millions of readers each month, and their overhead is the cost of a high-speed Internet line.
However, what they're actually doing is jumping out of one silo and into another. Google is the master silo in this scenario.
So, what do you think? what is the role of SEO in the future? Will it be more about making connections, and a less about making pages? Will the page itself be subverted? Have Google gone moved beyond the idea of "organizing the world's information"?
So Google insists on making changes, even after the second edition of AdWords For Dummies has gone to press. How annoying! ;)
A couple of weeks ago, I was teaching on a live web clinic and I wanted to show someone how to use the Keyword Tool within the AdWords account.
Trouble was, I couldn’t find it.
Fairly embarrassing, considering my positioning as the guy who can explain AdWords. A little like Rachael Ray not being able to use a can opener.
After some fumbling around, I found the Keyword Tool, hidden under a new tab called “Opportunities.”
Let’s take a quick tour:
See the list of tools, down the left side? The keyword tool still owns pride of place, on top, as it should be. It’s a wicked useful tool, and it provides better info than a host of paid keyword tools. (If you don’t yet know how to use it to tell the difference between profitable and unprofitable markets, watch the free Traffic Surge web clinic here and then register for Traffic Surge, which starts October 8, 2009).
Really, that’s all I have to say today.
If you have the budget resources the best time to hire an SEO is before you start your website projects. However, most people new to the web lack the cashflow needed to buy quality SEO services. Further if they don't understand the complexities of the market and get bombarded with cheap (and low to no value) SEO package offers from web hosts, registrars, and email spammers they may think SEO should be cheap and easy, causing them to buy garbage - and become distrusting of the concept of SEO.
Your best bet (if you are new to the SEO field) is to do as many of the following as are practical
...and then from that collection of knowledge you can start building a bit of a strategy, some momentum, and some cash flow. That way if/when you do hire an SEO, you are the type of client who is worth having (ie: one that will receive a positive ROI, one who knows the basics and will make sure suggestions are implemented, and one who is willing to allocate significant resources in the search game).
If you are a small or local player in a fairly non-competitive non-saturated niche (a clue here might be if your AdWords campaign is instantly profitable then the market probably is not too saturated) you might be able to do well hiring an affordable SEO right out of the gate, but when you get down into the lower price bucket for services there is a market for lemons effect and over 99% of the offers are scams.
In spite of claims to the contrary, you can do SEO and SEM yourself, especially if the market is not saturated. More and more companies SEO is getting baked right into their content process and company culture - many companies that hire third party consultants also have an in house SEO team. Search is the highway new customers drive on for the next hundred years. SEO will be taught as a fundamental piece of marketing strategy in the next decade.
The big limitations to doing SEO yourself are if you don't understand some of the risks vs rewards and use a singularly focused SEO strategy then those types of sites can have wildly fluctuating rankings and higher than needed risk levels. The more supports you have the more solid and stable your search rankings will be, but if you just find 1 loophole that works and exploit it aggressively then when it stops working those types of sites can come crashing down.
This is where having an SEO consultant on retainer makes a lot of sense. It prevents some of the oh crap, I just destroyed my business moments that Google shows business owners every day. Think of an SEO consultant on retainer as an insurance policy on your business.
In the last couple days I have had multiple people contact me about their site after it got whacked in Google. That is sorta the wrong time to contact an SEO...it is far better to do so while you still have growth, momentum, and cashflow. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
If your site is banned or filtered then sometimes you have to take a step back before moving forward. A site that was banned for buying too many links will be looked at and evaluated more closely upon review by Google - such reviews take some gray hat opportunities off the table... a significant lasting cost in a competitive set of search results where business is often won or loss on small differences in strategy.
And in many cases where a site was penalized for being too aggressive there are similar techniques that can be used with a far lower risk profile. Hiring an SEO who can help you manage risk and growth while you have momentum (or during the slightest pull back) makes a lot of sense. It is leveraging expertise to help build a stronger foundation and a deeper competitive moat.
But asking them for help after your site is banned is much harder because for them to help you get unbanned they might have to try to ask for some favors or try to leverage their feedback channels they earned with the search engines. If they just keep making requests to get penalties removed then that makes them look pretty spammy, kills those feedback channels, and in some egregious cases penalties can take years to be lifted.
The goal of an SEO is not just to rank your site, but to keep it ranked as the structure of the web changes, Google's business goals change, and your competitive landscape changes. This often means working the gray areas to get a site built up, and then pulling back on the sketchier stuff as momentum is built and solid supports take over the role of pushing up rankings.
Managing risk is probably the singular most undervalued aspect of SEO consulting. Largely because the cost does not appear until it does - and by then it is already too late.
A reader wonders:
What’s the relationship between AdWords and the landing page? How should keywords be used on the web site to achieve consistant quality rankings? Google gives me low quality scores because it says my landing page quality is “Poor.” What can I do?
My reply:
Your landing page has two customers: Google, and the visitor. If you don’t please Google (as represented by a “No Problems” designation), then the visitor doesn’t matter. They won’t ever see your landing page.
So let’s start with Google.
Google grades landing pages on a pass-fail basis. It’s either a problem, or no problem. There’s no middle ground. Like pregnancy. As much as I find duality to be an illusion of consciousness, it’s really in play here.
So when your landing page triggers a “Poor” score (see screen shot below for how you can tell), you have to fix the problem right away.
Most landing page problems fall into two categories: bad or missing content.
Bad content means, as Perry Marshall wrote last month, that some Google rep is responding negatively to the question, “Would I send my grandmother to this site?”
Maybe you sell questionable stuff, in Google’s eyes. Maybe you are (or appear to be) a zero-value-adding reseller (ie affiliate). Maybe you promise something in your ad (free tarot reading) and offer something completely different ($4 tarot reading).
Here’s what Google says (click here for the source):
Website Types to Avoid
The following website types will be penalized with low landing page quality scores. If we receive complaints about ads for websites of this kind, they will not be allowed to continue running.
* Data collection sites that offer free items, etc., in order to collect private information
* Arbitrage sites that are designed for the purpose of showing ads
* Malware sites that knowingly or unknowingly install software on a visitor’s computer
Website Types to Advertise with Caution
The following website types will sometimes merit low landing page quality scores and may be difficult to advertise affordably. If you choose to advertise one of these website types, be particularly careful to adhere to our landing page quality guidelines – especially the rule about offering unique content.
* eBook sites
* ‘Get rich quick’ sites
* Comparison shopping sites
* Travel aggregators
* Affiliates
Google is quite explicit about what it wants to see on your landing page: relevance, originality, transparency, and navigability.
Your landing page must be about the same thing as your keyword and ad. It must not be an exact or close-to-exact copy of information found on some other website (Brad Geddes reassured me that duplicate content penalties don’t occur when identical content lives on the same website – so you can split test within a single domain to your heart’s delight).
You must share information about your business, your privacy policy, and your shipping and refund policies, if applicable. Your site can’t mess around with their computer, installing programs, resizing windows, or making you want to punch your screen (actually, I made that last one up). If you show ads, make sure visitors can tell the difference between the ads and the editorial content.
You must make it easy for visitors to find what they’re looking for. Here’s Google’s advice:
Actually, just follow Google’s advice for the most part, and your pages will be, at the very least, acceptable to your visitors. But if the Google bar is low, the Conversion bar is quite high. Just “not sucking” is good enough for Google, but it won’t make you sales.
Here’s the best landing page advice I can give:
Your landing page fulfills the promise of your ad.
Every ad is a promise. It goes like this: “Click me (and ignore everything else on this page) and you’ll get…”
The “…” is the reason they click your ad. Either you promise it explicitly (”Free download” or “Canon PowerShot SD780 $279 Free Shipping” or “Complete Guide to Garlic-Scented Candles”) or the promise is implicit and must be assumed by the searcher (”Landing Page optimization system. Achieve maximum CTR with science. www.sitespect.com”).
Ask a few friends who don’t know anything about your business to read your ad and tell you what they think they’re being promised.
That’s your landing page.
Actually, that’s the top of your landing page.
You see, you don’t always have to fulfill the promise on the landing page. Nobody thinks they’re going to read SiteSpect’s landing page and instantly achieve maximum CTR (that’s click through rate, for you AdWords newbies).
But they have to believe they’re in the right place, on the right trail. Ben Hunt talks about the scent trail of search. Like a bloodhound searching for the owner of the sweaty sock, your visitor is also in pursuit of a goal, and will naturally take the path that appears to be the quickest route to that goal.
Most landing pages fail in the first 7 seconds. Something about the header graphic, the headline (or more commonly, lack thereof), and overall design just screams “It ain’t me, Babe, No no no, it ain’t me, Babe, it ain’t me you’re looking for, Babe.”
(If you want to watch a youtube video of me performing this song, leave a comment to that effect. If I get 10 comments, by golly, I’ll do it. 15 comments, I’ll add the harmonica. Of course, you’re also free to beg me not to.)
Recently I met Mugurdy, a visual search engine that, instead of showing links, shows actual landing page snapshots side by side. While it currently runs off the Yahoo API, it’s still a fascinating and valuable tool for anyone looking to improve their landing page design and top messaging.
Let’s say you’re advertising for the keyword tarot reading. Here’s what your user would see if they searched on Yahoo:
Take a minute and pretend you’re looking for a tarot reading – which listing do you choose?
Using Mugurdy, the user decides based on the look of the landing page. So here’s their results for tarot reading:
Now, based on those images, which site would you visit? (I personally lean toward the seventh one, the Tarot Course page with the yellow sidebar. It looks like the one where I’ll learn the most, and I like the look of the page. If I landed on one of the black-background pages, I’d probably bounce back to Yahoo within seconds. But that’s just me.)
Chances are, the winner in visual search won’t be the same as the ad text winner. And if that’s the case, then somebody’s landing page is sub-optimized for this traffic.
Mugurdy hasn’t yet created a visual search engine for AdWords listings, but you can use it to get an instant snapshot of a bunch of competitors’ sites. And you’ll learn a lot about how to make a landing page instantly attractive, based on the promise of the ad.
If you want to create landing pages that totally fulfill the promise of the ad, while leading to sales, not just happy browsers, check out the Traffic Surge course that begins October 8, 2009.
Graduates of the last Traffic Surge course have been raving about it (that’s why I’m offering it again). They feel like they’ve unlocked the mystery of AdWords, and can now research and succeed in any market they want.
There are still a couple of seats left that include a free live Checkmate workshop in Durham in early December ($2000 value). Act quickly to reserve your seat.
You would either have to be new to the industry or under a rock to not notice how the SEO industry has become more corporate over the past 3 or 4 years. The trend has been slow and gradual with many small steps, but I thought it would be a good idea to try to put the pieces together. What started off as a 5 minute project took a couple hours. I hope you like it! If you are a creative thinker you should be able to get a number of actionable ideas by thinking about how such trends will change your market.
Warning: this image is big! ~ 225KB
http://www.seobook.com/images/corporate-seo.gif
This is sorta a high level document which looks at many existing and emerging trends and how they combine to change the landscape. A lot of small businesses and small online publishers are feeling the following trend
In a recent comment on a blog post about link buying Google's Matt Cutts stated:
Personally, I believe the reason that so many people come to Google is that for the last decade, we’ve worked really hard to protect our users and return the best search results. When other search engines showed pop-up ads, Google didn’t. When every other major search engine offered pay-for-inclusion into their search results, Google didn’t. And Google has taken strong action to protect our users from spam, malware, and poor-quality sites. I think part of Google’s lead (and brand loyalty) in the search space is because we’ve taken strong action to protect our users.
Sure I think they try to protect people (and do a good job), but I never really see the bits that are inaccessible, so I don't know what I am missing. In time I do wonder if you could have too much media consolidation due to favorable reviews of "too big to fail" brand companies while smaller competitors are flushed away for using similar marketing techniques.
To the best of my ability in the above linked image I tried to explain why SEO outing is bad in how it influences the entire search engine optimization, search, and online media ecosystems. If I had to shorten it down to 3 points, those would be...
Google's Eric Schmidt claims that "brands are how you sort out the cesspool." Brands take money to build, but they are bought and sold just like anything else - only they require more capital and/or more insider connections to buy.
You know those damn bankers who bankrupted their own companies through the use of leverage and predatory lending? And then the same people lied, cheated, and looted trillions of Dollars from United States tax payers to save their companies (and pay their bonuses)?
Well they are not only leading media advertisers, but they now own a HUGE chunk of the traditional media sphere:
One wonders why Goldman and JPM were so eager to provide "rescue" financings to virtually the entire distressed media space: both companies knew too well that sooner or later they would end up with full equity control over essentially the most coveted industry: thousands of TV stations, radio channels, newspaper and magazines. If you thought the media propaganda was unbearable now, just wait.
