Google rewards landing page strategy with lower advertising prices and better organic search positions
By: Jonathan Briggs
October 1, 2006
Search Engine Watch in Search Arbitrage: Good or Evil? discusses how some unscrupulous companies are buying PPC ads that instead of linking to useful content simply lead to further ads.
They are attempting to make a small profit between the money they make from showing ads and the cost of advertising these useless sites. This article suggests the search engines are making attempts to stop the practice.
Google, for example, now examines the page to which an advert links and rewards relevant content with higher advertising positions and lower prices.
This reinforces the need to design sites with content rich "landing pages" that can be used as destinations for advertising links.
It's a win-win strategy as these pages are also more likely to figure highly in organic search results.
It does however require some careful thinking about how these pages should be designed and constructed as they present many visitors with their first impressions of the site. Care must be taken to establish the brand and the offerings of the business without letting this obscure the content of the page itself.
the OTHER media has been using a landing page strategy for many of its sites with considerable success. These sites are the easiest to promote to the search engines and the easiest to advertise and our clients have been rewarded with significant growth in revenue.