Creating A Google Friendly Landing Page For PPC!

Long gone are the days of thrown together a sin­gle page web page to test a Google Adwords cam­paign and affil­i­ate offer. Google dom­i­nates ‘search’ and nowhere more so than in the UK, so to be suc­cess­ful in affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing you need to keep the Google gods happy and cre­ate a web­site that ticks all the boxes.

Ill admit that i have been a lazy affil­i­ate, so it prob­a­bly took me longer than most (denial) to real­ize that i was going to have to work hard for my money if i was really going to be a suc­cess­ful inter­net mar­keter. Many peo­ple decid­ing on affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing as a career do not fully appre­ci­ate the effort and time suc­cess­ful mar­keters devote to their online projects. Times have changed and affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing has evolved, a sin­gle web page of below aver­age con­tent is no longer enough to make money online, Google espe­cially has cam­paigned for this change by imple­ment­ing many hur­dles to reg­u­late web­site qual­ity and many penal­ties for those not adher­ing to their def­i­n­i­tion (of qual­ity). With every change comes oppor­tu­nity! If you have the drive, skills, deter­mi­na­tion and above all the cor­rect men­tal atti­tude to learn what makes a great web­site you are already one step ahead of the crowd.

So what is Google look­ing for? They are look­ing for you to pro­vide value to your reader!

Google them­selves offer some insight into what they are look­ing for by defin­ing four major cat­e­gories that they con­sider when decid­ing an appro­pri­ate qual­ity score for your web­site, these are: Rel­e­vant & Orig­i­nal Content, Transparency & Navigability.

Rel­e­vant and Orig­i­nal Content

Google wants web­mas­ters to pro­vide unique well writ­ten con­tent that pro­vides users with infor­ma­tion that they may not be able to find on any other web­site. If your web page is made up of mostly ads you need to add more content.

Tans­parency

Our busi­ness information

Every web­site or land­ing page must include infor­ma­tion about the web­site own­ers sum­marised in an ‘About Us’page. Ths page should also con­tain con­tact infor­ma­tion (the more the bet­ter). You should also sum­marise your ser­vice in an open manner.

Your site’s inter­ac­tion with a visitor’s computer

This infor­ma­tion can be added to your web­site by adding a basic ‘pri­vacy pol­icy’ explain­ing what infor­ma­tion is col­lected from vis­i­tors to your web­site and how this infor­ma­tion will be used. To write this page you may want to con­sider ana­lyt­ics track­ing & cook­ies, also infor­ma­tion on any down­loads from your website.

Vis­i­tors’ per­sonal information

Both Google and vis­i­tors to your web­site like to know how any per­sonal infor­ma­tion you col­lect will be used. This infor­ma­tion can be included in your ‘pri­vacy pol­icy’ and should also include how third party adver­tis­ers (your mer­chants) will use cus­tomer data.

Nav­i­ga­tion

Make sure your nav­i­ga­tion is vis­i­tor friendly and does not include any obtru­sive pop-ups or pop-unders. Also Google likes your page to load quickly, for infor­ma­tion on how to improve this visit here. Turn to Google’s Web­mas­ter Guide­linesfor more rec­om­men­da­tions, which will improve your site’s per­for­mance in Google’s search results as well.

Your Land­ing Page Should Include The Fol­low­ing Pages

About Us

You should describe the pur­pose of your web­site and your ser­vice, you should also give infor­ma­tion about the peo­ple or busi­ness oper­at­ing the website.

Pri­vacy Policy

As described above your pri­vacy pol­icy should include infor­ma­tion on how you han­dle cus­tomer data, affil­i­ates will need to give infor­ma­tion on how there mer­chants han­dle this data.

Terms & Conditions

As explained in detail above, click here for fur­ther resources.

Con­tact Us

Even if you are an affil­i­ate your cus­tomers want to know who you are and ow they can con­tact you if they need to. You should try and pro­vide more than one way of con­tact and i pos­si­ble pro­vide a full postal address.

Sitemap

Your sitemap should be acces­si­ble from all pages on your website.

Con­sider Includ­ing The Fol­low­ing Pages

1. News — add new­sto­ries fromy­our niche or subject.

2. Blog -  edi­to­r­ial com­ments here and opinions.

3. How To or What Is Guide — pages with detailed unique con­tent describ­ing the product/service you are pro­mot­ing and how they work.

4. FAQ’s — think of every ques­tion related to the prod­uct or ser­vice and list them here with infor­ma­tive answers.

5. Glos­sary -  cre­ate an A-Z of indus­try spe­cific jar­gon here and define it.

6. Deals/Offer pages — list any offers avail­able from your merchants.

7. Indi­vid­ual product/pages - Offer other prod­ucts and ser­vices related to your main prod­uct or service.

8. Sub­mit your review — offer your users the oppor­tu­nity to sub­mit their own product/reviews.

If you cre­ate your land­ing page with your poten­tial cus­tomers in mind and are not just act­ing as bridge between the cus­tomer and mer­chant you should soon have an author­ity site for your niche. Con­tent is King!