Improve Your Internet Marketing

Some of us may not realize that Google Adwords CPC’s (Cost per Click), the amount we pay for a click on a keyword, is a variable. There is NO SUCH THING AS A $.10 KEYWORD! Neither is there such thing as a $.50 keyword, or a $5.00 keyword. This is because Google’s base CPC, the minimum you must pay to trigger your ad for a given keyword, varies. It depends on a slew of factors including match type, relevance of the landing page, and the adgroup’s CTR or Click Through Rate. My $.10 keyword might cost you $.65! Or vice-versa…

Even two campaigns with identical ads, adgroups, and landing pages will probably be offered different base CPC’s by Google, because factors like campaign and Adwords account history, even account age are taken into account.

Still, we do have a great degree of control over what our base CPC will be. Quality Score is largely a measure of “Relevance”, loosely defined as how relevant the destination (landing page) is to the search query - even an ad with none of the bid keywords in it going to a relevant landing page will do ok, but the best ad going to an irrelevant landing page gets “slapped”.

To determine overall relevancy, Google looks at the correlation, or ‘coupling’ between keyword, ad, and landing page. Simply put, this means that the more you optimize your landing page for the targeted keyword, the higher your Quality Score Relevancy, and the lower your CPC.

(This is the real ‘juice’ with a product like SpeedPPC - it produces the tightest ‘coupling’ by creating adgroups around a single keyword, and then optimizing the landing page on the fly for that same keyword. Really quite an amazing tool.)

If you are creating your own landing page, or having it outsourced, here are the things (besides the page copy) that will boost your Quality Score and lower your CPC:

1. Destination URL. Choose a domain name with your primary keywords in it, even if you have to hyphenate, underscore, or add i.e. best-web-hosting.com, or best_web_hosting_.com, or even best-web-hosting-(planet/world/land/ever/now/etc…)
2. Page Title. This is your ‘title tag’, and what appears at the top of the browser window. Begin your title with your primary keyword or keyword phrase. After the URL, this is the most important factor.
3. H1 Tag. This is generally the first body-text on the page. And you don’t have to have your H1 tag text be in giant fonts - you can specify the font while still using the H1 tag.

Of course, having your keywords in the page body copy is extremely important. In fact, with Google’s Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), it’s important to make the copy legitimately relevant - Google calculates not just for your keyword, but for semantically-relevant keywords surrounding it.

If you follow these basic steps with your landing pages, you will steer clear of getting ’slapped’, and go a long way to getting lower, an hence more competitive minimum CPC’s.