Improve Paid Search with Better Content

Every month the Google AdWords bill comes in, and it is for the maximum amount of your budget. You have picked out the best keywords, which is why people are clicking and thus, they are all converting into sales and customers, right? Case closed. Easy blog for this guy. Glad I picked this topic. Time to start drinking…Wait, what? That is not how it works? I guess that’s why the Cat-wearing-a-hat2fortune you are spending on a Cat Hats paid search campaign has not made you an overnight billionaire. There are several content driven factors in a paid search campaign that will affect your results.

Paid Search Ad Copy

You have 95 characters on Google AdWords to make sure you grab the attention of your potential customer/client, and those same 95 characters to weed out anyone who would just waste your ad budget. I am going to repeat a phrase that I believe I mentioned early on in this blog I was going to say over and over. Content is king! Make sure you are giving the audience the right impression. If you write the ad properly you will drive qualified traffic to your landing page. If you write it poorly, you will wind up with unqualified visitors and wind up wasting your budget. So if people cannot tell if you are selling hats for cats or hats that look like cats, you Cat_Styled_Hatwill waste money with the wrong audience clicking though. I wish I could tell you the amount of times I have gone shopping for a hat for my cat only to be disappointed with only finding hats that look like cats! (That is not a search I have ever actually performed.)

Landing Page Optimization

Here is where your content really comes into play. So you have bought the right keywords and written a great ad that has gotten your target audience to come to your website, but where do they go? You want to make sure you are directing them to a well crafted landing page. It needs to be extremely relevant to the topic they were searching for so they know they are in the right place. You have about 20 seconds before your would-be customer clicks on the back button and goes to the next listing. You will have just lost a potential sale and wasted money on a click through that was completely qualified.

So how do I convert the qualified lead?

There are 2 things you can do to convert the lead:

  • Make sure your content is relevant
  • Grab their attention

Cat_ApparelRelevancy: If the term they searched for was hats for cats you sell all types of pet apparel, then DO NOT send them to your homepage. Instead of just finding hats for cats, they have to navigate through all your products to find what you already knew they were looking for. Instead send them to a landing page that specifically has what they want, hats for cats. If you have an ad campaign for blue hats for cats, then have an even more specific landing page with blue selected as the color. The more specific you can get, the batter, because remember, that back button is only a click away!
Grab their attention: Since this was an example I came up with to show content, I chose a topic that I could find a plethora of great imagery. My future cousin-in-law (is there such a thing?) is a huge fan of felineography (yup, just coined that term, you are welcome world). I Hat_For_Catschose my topic with that content in mind. (Congrats Greg and Laura!). So, assuming again you are selling hats for cats, you just need to include some great photographs of your products being modeled. A strong headline, “Hats for Cats” that matches their search query, a great image and related content, a few choices and a buy now button will make sure that in that 20 second window your audience knows they have come to the right place and hopefully are enticed to be converted into customer.

Off Topic

Cat_Hat_For_Dog  dog_on_cat cat_on_dog
I found these images and had to figure out a way to work them in. Make sure your images are relevant too. If everything on your page screams “Hats for Cats” and then you have a few random photos of cats being word as hats, well, you could just crash the entire internet. Or at least confuse potential customers.
And of course, we can’t forget the original Cat in the Hat!
Cat_In_The_Hat

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