The following excerpt is from Perry Marshall, Mike Rhodes and Bryan Todd’s book Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes | IndieBound Imagine you’re walking past a sporting goods store and you see an amazing pair of sneakers in the window. You walk into the shop and the sneakers are nowhere to be found. Or worse, a security guard stops you at the door and demands to know your address and phone number.
Not a great first impression.
Your landing page is the same way. When you make a promise in your ad, your visitors expect you to deliver on it when they arrive at your page. They won’t stick around otherwise.
Your landing page will perform best when it looks and feels like a natural continuation of your ad. What keywords or phrases made your ad sing? What colors or images got people’s attention? What ballsy promise did you make? Don’t lose your prospect! Match those same elements on your landing page.
Google’s editors look for this same pattern. They want to see an uninterrupted chain of relevance — a “scent” — starting from the initial search query, to the keyword, to the ad, right through to the landing page. Provide these key elements on your page and you’ll keep Google on your side:
A clear business model
If a Google editor manually reviews your site, they should be able to tell in fewer than 20 seconds what it is you actually do. How do you make your money? Are you selling a course, a product or a service? The editor wants assurance that you’re not harvesting emails in order to spam. Your page should describe what will happen once your visitors opt in…
