Not Your Ordinary Web Traffic: How to Drive Qualified Visitors to Your Site, Part 4

Here it is — the last installment of my series on driving qualified visitors through your paid search (SEM) campaign. In part one of this series, I discussed PPC keyword selection as the first two steps in qualifying traffic, and in part two I showed you how to optimize your ad copy in order to drive traffic from the visitors that you’d most prefer.

Remember that qualifying your paid search traffic has two parts:

Promote visits from users who are most likely to drive a conversion
Eliminate traffic from visitors who are least likely to drive a conversion

Also remember that, as compared to organic search traffic (where you welcome visitors in all phases of the sales funnel), the most effective and efficient SEM campaigns can focus on driving visits that produce conversions. Let your organic search optimization efforts drive the “information-gathering” traffic, use your PPC campaign to target the “purchasing” consumer.

Now that we’ve covered three steps to improve your campaign, let’s dive into the next tactic that will help you drive valuable clicks:

Step 4: Create Landing Pages to Promote Your Conversion Point

You’ve set up your PPC keywords, you’ve created some unbelievably enticing ad copy to get your audience to click … now what? The process of converting your traffic from visitors into customers is technically over, as you’ve now received a visitor from your SEM campaign. But the most effective PPC campaigns do not stop optimization until after the most important part of this process – the conversion point. If I am running a campaign to sell a widget, and I’ve received my captive audience through paid search, I want to make darn sure that I make the final piece of their purchasing process is both obvious and easy.

Once I’ve paid for this click, the last thing that I want the visitor to do is get distracted, bored, confused or frustrated. I want to subtly but firmly guide them through the conversion (or transactional) process. That’s why the landing page in a paid search campaign is so important. I’ll give you three quick tips to create an effective landing page, all geared towards promoting a conversion point.

Don’t DISTRACT your visitor with unnecessary linking. Linking (both internal and inbound links) are the lifeblood of a successful SEO campaign. Google takes the number and quality of the links associated with your site as a huge indicator of your sites relevance, but they have very little use on a paid search landing page. In fact, if you have links pointing away from this landing page, chances are you’re going to see a certain percentage of your traffic, you know, actually click on those links. Why would you want your captive (and costly!) visitor navigate away from your conversion point? You don’t! So eliminate linking on your paid search landing page.
Don’t BORE your visitor with superfluous content. The most effective pages for paid search are concise and to the point. This is not an informational visit – this is transactional visit. If you are on a tight marketing budget, leave it to your SEO team to produce informational traffic. Use your paid search landing page to focus on providing just enough information to keep the visitor interested, without forgetting what they are supposed to do on that page. To do this, use the body copy on your landing page to promote the information that is most likely to provide a sale or conversion – such as your product’s benefits and uses, or reasons why your product is better than the competition. Customers don’t really need to know about your company history, for example, in order to complete the purchasing process. Focus on the pertinent information that they will need to complete their purchase, and don’t BORE them with too much information.
Don’t FORGET what you’re trying to do! This is the simplest, but most important aspect of landing page optimization: make sure to feature your conversion point is both obvious and easy. If you are trying to generate sales leads with a contact form option you must do two things: keep it short, and keep it visible. Create a contact form that is found front and center on your landing pages, so that there is no possible way that your visitor can miss it. Additionally, make the conversion point as easy for the user to complete as possible. For a lead generation form, only include the information that is crucial for your business, without making the process of filling out the form daunting for the visitor. Strike that balance between asking for as much information as possible and ease of use for your visitor. This screenshot is a good example of an effective paid search landing page for the keyword “health insurance quote”:

Note that the page is simple, does not contain too much text, and provides no linking away from this page. The visitor, who has arrived on a very specific keyword search (including the word “quote”) is confronted with exactly the type of information that they have requested, and are more likely to convert as a result!

There you have it – four easy steps to generating and converting qualified paid search traffic! Apply these tactics to your campaign and you just might get a more efficient use of your marketing dollars.