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How To Avoid
"The Google Slap" With Your Adwords Pay Per Click Campaign
Copyright
© by John
Baril
The term Google
slap is commonly used for a
penalty imposed on a Google Adwords pay per click campaign in which ads
point
to landing pages that have very little content that is relevant to the
ad. If
Google thinks that your landing page is not relevant enough, you will
be given
a low quality score and have your minimum bid raised for some or all of
your
keywords that point to that landing page.
Landing pages
suffered from the Google slap
because they were full of sales hype rather than useful and relevant
content.
Additionally, anyone who was using one landing page for assorted
keyword
campaigns would run into trouble. Pages that took a while to download
also
suffered from the Google slap.
If
you’re planning on starting an Adwords pay
per click campaign, take a look at these guidelines to help you avoid
the
Google slap. Yes, the Google slap still exists today, so you want to do
what
you can to pay as low of a bid as possible per keyword.
There are four
key elements that you’ll need to
implement and also be sure that they are all in thematic agreement with
each
other and specifically targeted. The four elements include: the keyword
phrase
you are bidding on, the landing page, ad copy and the search queries
people use
to trigger your Adwords ads.
1. Keywords:
Keywords are a string of words or a
phrase that you want to target because it’s relevant to your
product or service,
and a lot of people would use your keyword phrase when searching to buy
it. A
"search query" describes the keyword phrase that someone types into
the search field.
How can you
find the
most relevant and best performing keywords for your ad campaign? You
should
start with only the bare essentials of what it is you are trying to
sell and
what search query people might use to search for it. There
are several free and subscription-based keyword research services to
help you
build up your keyword list. These services can help you keep adding
potential
keyword phrases until you have a list of about 100 different phrases to
use.
When
you have a comfortable list of keyword
phrases, you’ll want to find a few keywords that have good
click-through-rates
(CTR) that will attract a decent amount of traffic, but make sure that
they’re
not too competitive. This is really important if you’re on a
tight budget as
you don’t want to spend any more per click as you absolutely
have to. The more
competitive a keyword phrase is, the more you’re going to pay.
Check whether
or not keywords are likely to
deliver sales by checking their "commercial intention" at:
http://adlab.microsoft.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/
2. Landing
page: You’ll
want to make a landing page for each keyword phrase that you use.
It’s
important to place the phrase between the Title tags and the
Heading tags as well as in the main body of the page.
Use
unique content to fill the page and use an
editorial style rather than hyped up sales language. The content should
be
based around the topic of the keyword phrase.
Link to the
landing page from other pages on
your website, but be sure to use the keyword phrase as the anchor text
for your
inbound links.
3. Pay per
click campaign ad copy: You must include
the exact keyword phrase you’re using in your ad copy.
4. Search
query: After
your Google Adwords campaign has run for a while you can research the
actual
search queries that triggered your Adwords ad and see the CTR by
selecting the
keywords you want to look at and clicking on "See search
terms."
If
a search query is highly relevant, you can
add it to your list of keywords for the campaign and make a new landing
page
specifically for that keyword phrase.
You can also
check your
search queries for negative keywords as well. These are irrelevant
searches
that trigger your Adwords ad and are very unlikely to
produce any sales. You’ll want to eliminate any unsuitable
search queries from
your campaign by using the "Edit Campaign Negative Keywords Tool."
If
you follow all four of these steps, you will
build a highly relevant Adwords pay per click campaign that will most
likely
avoid the Google slap and keep your cost-per-click (CPC) as low as
possible
while improving your CTR
I
wish you the best of success,
John Baril
Copyright © John Baril
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