The Google Slap Will Hit You Hard if Your Landing Pages Don’t Meet Their Adwords Guidelines

If you read Google’s “Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines” carefully, you’ll find this paragraph that tells you everything you need to do succeed with Adwords:

“Furthermore, following our site guidelines will help improve your landing page quality score. As a component of your keywords’ overall Quality Scores, a high landing page quality score can affect your AdWords account in three ways:

-Decrease your keywords’ cost-per-clicks (CPCs)

-Increase the position of your keyword-targeted ads on the content network

-Improve the chances that your placement-targeted ads will win a position on your targeted placements”

Basically, what Google wants are good quality landing pages. It’s that simple. And good quality to Google means that:

-the pages are relevant to the keywords in your ads

-you have original content in your pages

-the pages enable your visitors to know who you are

-your pages are easily navigable

Google penalizes “opt-in” or “squeeze pages” that are thrown up just to build marketing lists, or pre-sell affiliate pages.

They hit those pages hard with the “Google Slap” (forcing high bids) and the advertisers end up spending more money for less exposure and profit.

Why does Google do this? It’s really simple.

Google knows that its AdWords product is only viable if people believe they will be sent to a relevant site that provides them with the information they’re looking for when they click on an ad. They want the landing pages to have content that’s useful to the visitor.

So here’s how to design your landing pages to avoid the “Google Slap.”

-Make sure your landing pages have original content that’s not available on any other site. It means more -work, but there’s no way to get around it. If you’re an affiliate, don’t copy content from the advertiser’s site.

-Add the following additional pages to your site:

   -About Us ─ who you are and give them some business details.

   -Terms and Conditions  ─ anything they need to know about doing business with you.

   -Privacy Policy ─ what you will do with any information they give you.

   -Contact ─ how to reach you.

-Make sure any ads on your pages are easily identifiable.

-Don’t make your visitors register to get access to your pages.

-Make sure your pages load quickly.

-Don’t use popups or flash if you don’t absolutely need them.

If you follow their guidelines, you will avoid the “Google Slap,” and you’ll spend less money, your ads will rank higher, and you’ll make more sales.

And isn’t that the name of the game?.

If you need more help, you might want to get Perry Marshall’s The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords course.  Perry knows what he’s talking about ─ he’s the indisputable King of Adwords.

Tags: adword, adwords, Google Adwords, Google Slap, landing pages, Perry Marshall, quality score