How to pick keywords that merit thier own landing page

Even in 2008, an impressive number of businesses have not decided to optimize their landing page. In fact, according to the latest Marketing Sherpa study on keyword buying, 68% of American companies use landing pages for their keyword campaigns. While this number is far from being bad, it’s a sure bet that it’s not as optimistic on this side of the border.

Yet, there are advantages of investing more time and money on the development and optimization of landing pages. Google made major changes to their algorithms last September, giving a higher importance to landing pages with a good « Quality Score ». These modifications were primarily aimed to decrease the number of web pages specifically created for data collection, advertisements to make money and spyware software installation. However, these alterations not only affect « spammy » sites; they also affect your landing pages!

Conclusion : The optimization of your landing pages for your keyword buys has never been this profitable.

It is not always an obvious decision on what keywords a landing page should be established for. Some say that an ad should not be directed to the homepage of a site. Others create landing pages for each keyword. In practice, it is sometimes difficult to prioritize pages that should be optimized. Here are two important questions to consider when deciding which keywords deserve a landing page.

Are the costs important enough to justify a landing page?

By analyzing keywords of your campaign and their associated budget, you’ll be able to evaluate those that represent the most important costs. In the first phase, it is useless to concentrate on keywords from the « long tail » since these efforts will probably be more important than the actual results. However, in the subsequence phases, a deeper study of the « long tail » will probably allow to find patterns that necessarily need landing pages to be created.

What is the type of keywords?

You then need to get into the shoes of the net surfer and understand what they were really looking for by performing the search. Multiple search queries indicate that the net surfer is looking for a reference page: a page where they find information and details on a product, service or other. These searches are generally performed in the early stages of the buying process. If we take the example of an electronic product store, the search terms would be « Plasma TV » and « Blue-Ray Player ».

On the other hand, we find search results where the net surfer demonstrates a clear desire for action and searches for more transactional page (not to say there would necessarily be a sale, but the net surfer is open to the idea). In this case, searches could look like « 42’ Sony plasma TV » or « ipod touch 32gb».

Why is it important to separate search by reference VS transactional type? Simply because constructing landing pages that cater to reference type of searches costs a lot and will bring little return.

By analyzing your keyword buy campaigns with these two basic criterions, you can quickly find keywords that merit landing pages. To learn more about this subject, refer to the article Optimize your landing page with Google.