Building a website for PPC is a much different process than building a search engine optimized website. Although a profitable website should be balanced to function well for PPC and SEO, since with PPC you’re spending your hard earned money on traffic, you need to make sure that your web design is achieving results.
Since you’re paying for your traffic, you can’t afford to have any distraction on your website whatsoever. I like to only use PPC for websites that are extremely targeted and in a niche market-otherwise you’re probably wasting your money. Here are a few steps you need to take to help optimize a website for PPC:
- Remove advertising from your website. Nothing makes a customer want to leave more than visiting a website full of ads. Advertising also encourages your users to click on your ads and leave your website.
- Case studies show that single column websites perform better for PPC websites. Perhaps you’ve seen these “squeeze” pages before, where all of the content on a website is incorporated into one large page? Believe it or not, this simplistic design performs very well and is one of the most effective ways to make a sale.
- Make your sales pitch extremely targeted and do not sway from the point you’re trying to make.
- Include a call to action and repeat that call to action throughout the page. This means if your call to action is to have the user sign up for your newsletter, mention it several times throughout your copy.
- Most of the time, your headline is the only thing your visitor reads before they exit your website. Make sure that your headline matches exactly what existed in your advertisement.
- Finally you need to use multivariate testing. This means that you test several different versions of a web page and see which one performs better. You should test the copy of the following items of your web page:
- Headline
- Calls to Action
- Caption Copy
- Graphical Elements
- Body Copy
I cannot stress enough about relevancy and how important it is to the success of your online business. Here is my formula for success and it has worked for so many. Just remember the following:
Success = The Search Query + The Advertisement +
The Headline of Website + The Copy
All of the above should match up completely in relevancy. If a person types in “how to design a website” into Google, they should see an advertisement that reads “how to design a website” and then the web page he clicks should read somewhere in the headline “how to design a website”. The copy of the web page should contain everything about your “how to design a website” product. This is where most people run into problems with PPC advertising. The secret is to keep everything as relevant as possible.
