Your Homepage needs to be cleared for landing

The importance of a website landing page continues to grow in significance as companies compete for priority on the internet. The content and design of a landing page are some of the essential factors that Google will score when ranking your website.

When it comes to advertising on landing pages, Google is already rating their success by tracking whether or not the ads are clicked on and if that click leads to a purchase or subscription. They do this through a Google pay-per-click product called AdWords that, among others, is designed to track activity on a ‘thank you for purchasing page’ or a ‘thank you for subscribing’ page. This contributes to Google’s quality scoring system.

If you want to get the benefit of that information, sign up for a Gmail account, which will pave the way for you to open an AdWords account. After payment to Google of a once-off fee, you can plan your AdWords campaign yourself or enlist a service provider that specialises in that field to do it for you.

A commercial website with products to sell online may have several landing pages designed to meet the criteria of a broad search or a very defined one. That’s where keywords come in. A sale or conversion is most likely to come from an accurate search, where a user finds what he’s looking for quickly and easily, and hopefully at the right price. For example, a generic category page for a hammer may attract a higher volume of clicks, but a dedicated page for a ball-peen hammer will generate more sales because it matches the exact description of a specific search.

If there is no positive result from a search, Google will want to track if the user searches again, and how often. That doesn’t bode well for a good landing page quality score.

Enlisting the help of a search engine optimisation company takes some of the pain out of the process. When they bid for a paid advertising position on behalf of their clients, it’s not just about how much they’re prepared to pay. Google’s award of prime advertisement positions will be influenced by that client’s quality score.