I have a client who has a stated goal of increasing the conversion of his pay-per-click ad. Your PPC ad already appears in the first SERP (search engine results page) for a keyword phrase that is highly relevant to your profession. Your competitor’s websites are largely bland and yours looks better graphically.
So why isn’t traffic converting into leads and customers?
Pay per click advertising can be an extremely effective tool for lead generation or sales conversion. Research shows, however, that few people even scroll “below the fold” in the first SERP. Even fewer clicks on secondary SERPs and beyond. If you’re using a PPC ad that doesn’t appear in the first SERP, you probably won’t pay much because you’ll get very few clicks.
How to start
You start PPC with search engine optimization (SEO), associating the correct keyword phrases with your ad. That’s the trick to appearing in the first SERP. Unless you’re targeting the right keyword phrases, people looking for what you’re selling won’t find it.
SEO requires research into keyword tools and a view of what your competitors are doing. You can do this on your own, but if you’re not SEO trained and have some experience, you’re shooting in the dark.
My client has good keywords for his ad, but managing PPC isn’t just about getting people to click on his ad. That helps Google more than it helps him. It costs you money every time someone clicks on your ad, whether they convert to a customer or not.
PPC Secret
The secret to PPC marketing and getting conversions is landing page content. Some websites create a custom landing page for your PPC ad, but this is not absolutely necessary.
What is necessary is that you follow these landing page rules:
- The search terms used by the search engine must appear on the page.
- The copy on the page must be relevant to what the searcher is looking for.
- The copy on the page must be compelling and written for human consumption.
You can do an exercise right now and search for any term you want. Click on any of the PPC ads that appear in your SERP. Look at the landing page. Is it clean, concise, and relevant to what you searched for? Does it make you want to contact the company? Is it just confusing and completely irrelevant to your search term?
If you want to write superior copy for the web and get PPC conversions, study a few of those pages and see what works and what doesn’t.
Now I have to go talk to my client about all this.