Designing Landing Page Content to Maximise Google Adsense Revenue

© janderson99-HubPages

Articles that are good to read and comprehensive don't make the most money. Your page has to leave your reader hungry so they will click the Google Adsense ads. You need to leave 'holes' or gaps on your pages that lead the user to the ads. Strange as this may sound this concept highlights what you must do to maximize your revenue from Google Adsense. As shown in the image there are major differences in the strategies for making money by selling and by generating adsense revenue:

Optimizing a WebSite to Sell

You will need a three pronged strategy:

• You will need fantastic content - so good that users will hardly ever want to click one of the adsense ads, only when what you provide is not really what they want. If they click the ad they will go to your competitor an perhaps never come back. Why would they? You have not provided what they wanted.
• You will need fantastic search optimisation - People doing searches will have to find you quickly and you will need to be on the first page of Google results for your keyword. You will need lots of quality back-links. You will have to work hard to get your PR value above 4.
• You will need a fantastic array of quality sub-pages - You will want lots of great sub-pages so that you can provide exactly what your customer wants by allowing him lots of specific options. Sub-pages also build PR and they also allow you to 'fish' more specifically using various keyword combinations. Remember that Google indexed PAGES Not SITES. So each page can have a different set of keywords, and provided you get backlinks for the sub-pages they can all work for you.

Optimizing a Website to Generate Adsense Revenue

The emphasis for these sites is totally different:

• You WANT people to FIND your SITE - SEO is your primary focus
• But you WANT them to be UNSATISFIED with what you offer and to CLICK THE ADS
• You want HOLES in your information that are filled by the Adsense ads
• So you want MEDIOCRE content with HOLES and EASY PATHS to the ads
• You want people to LEAVE YOUR SITE - you only expect to have them visit once or occasionally. When they leave you get the Adsense payment.
• You will tend to have fewer sub-pages, but these will be targeted towards the ads. as well

Isn't this contrary to the basic principles of Search Engine Optimisation?

Isn't this contrary to what Google wants?

How can you get indexed and a high PR value is your content is MEDIOCRE?

I'm not saying your content has to be bad or inferior. It simply has to have holes in it that the Adsense ads just happen to fit into. To attract people you will need to have a substantial amount of content (200+words) high relevance, originality and transparency, but there has to be something missing otherwise why would anyone look at the ads and click them to get the extra information they need or to find the things they want to buy.

Keywords and Landing Page Optimisation

This topic is dealt with by many other articles and it will not be discussed in detail here.

Your landing page information must include the set of keywords that you have selected as the target for the search engines and for your Pay per Clicks ads.

This means keyword optimisation is very important -

• which keywords,
• how they are combined,
• how they are used and placed on your landing page.

However, remember there is a big difference between creating content that is 'keyword rich' and the undesirable 'keyword stuffing'. Don't overdue it.

You will need to spend a lot of time on your keyword selection which must be targeted at two things:

1. Getting onto the first page for a Google search for your keywords
2. Organising things so that the ads produced by Google neatly fit into the holes or information gaps you have left.

Google has two free tools, The Keyword Tool -https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, [and their new tool New Keyword Tool (beta)] and the Google Traffic Estimator.

The choice of the keywords is a trade-off between the following: search volume; competition; Cost / Day (see image). The main considerations are:

• How popular a keyword or phrase is likely to be
• How many times that keyword is typically clicked on per day
• What the average cost per click, or pay per click, which is what advertisers would pay for clicks on those keywords.
• What competition there is for your keywords and phrases
• How many clicks you could expect to get per day
• The Estimate Avg. CPC for the keywords, which is short for ' estimated average Cost per Click'

If you're going to develop web pages to generate adsense revenue then why make a page for a 20 cent Adsense Ad when you could make one for a $10, $20 or even a $30 Ad. BUT these high return words are not much use if no one searches for he word or phrase. It is the cost/day (keyword price X clicks/day) that you need to focus on, not keyword price itself. Likewise you need to balance popularity (hits per day) with the amount of competition. Its not much use focusing on a word that is popular but has a lot of competition - you will be unlikely to have a high enough PR to get a share. So you my need to target a niche market with more specific keywords.

Conversion Intent

Another aspect is to promote the concept of 'conversion intent'. You will want your landing page to actively promote ‘conversion intent’. To do this, you need to consider the mindset of your visitor. You want your site to shift the intent of your user from wanting information about something, to wanting to purchase something and then actually buying it. If you have a sell site you will want to encourage the user to make the shift. If you have an Adsense site you will want to start the process but have the Adsense ads as the last steps.

There are four distinct phases in this process:

• subject research
• product research
• brand research
• merchant research

Then hopefully you have a sale or an Adsense hit. The searcher may start off searching for a ‘digital camera’, then for ‘digital camera reviews’, followed by ‘sony digital cameras’, followed by merchants and best price deals. After these steps, the consumer may be ready to buy.

What Does Google Want? How to Satisfy this with a Landing Page Design

A landing page is the opening page that is presented when an online customer clicks on an online ad or a search-engine result link.

Landing Page for a Sell Site - The purpose of a landing page for online marketing is to inform, motivate, persuade and to encourage the user to buy product or service offered on your well-designed and planned landing page.

Landing Page for an Adsense Site -The purpose shifts to providing good information but you want the users to click on the Adsense Ads to fill in the gaps.

The key elements of a good landing page are:

• good page structure,
• your content and SEO used to design it.
• your keyword selection and how you use them for SEO

Lets look at the information provided by Google themsleves about landing page design for adsense optimisation:

• They asses the structure, content and navigation of a website and look for the most relevant landing page that include a substantial amount of content that is highly relevant to not only your choice of keywords, but also to your ad text. Remember that a machine is doing this not humans.
• How to judge relevance - put yourself in the shoes of a user. Does your ad and landing page have language that makes sense in the context of the keywords you have chosen?
• Targeting your keywords, ads, and landing page structure will increase the customer's trust results, your site will be better targeted on your keywords and you can improve your overall Quality Score. There is a quality score for Adsense (Check with Google about this) – not just for Adwords. If your site has a low AQS (Adsense Quality Score), you will get paid less for the clicks your site generates. See Google Help pages for more information on this.

List of key points for Landing Page Design

• Keep it brief and on the Topic - Paragraphs should be short (less than 4 lines) and shoud only have a single idea that is introduced in the first sentence. Use dot points and lists.
• Keep the page contents targeted - Promote one goal, one message, one action especially with Adsense pages.
• Maintain Relevancy - For PPC and Adsense pages you need to ensure that the text ad copy is prominent and relevant. Keywords should be displayed in 'bold' type or otherwise displayed prominently. Make sure that the content is relevant to the search query (keyword combination), because that is why the user visited your site. Users should be able to easily navigate what your ad promises.
• Use a direct approach - Use bullets because most users will skim over you content, and use bold text to emphasise key messages
• Have clear messages - that will encourage converting or transitioning intent and focus on a clear call-to-action. In essence that means leading them to more detail about brands and merchants and having a big prominent BUY button.
• Stick to the Facts, be Direct, Use Persuasive Language - Don't hide the price, be transparent. For Adsense pages focus your users to making the decision to click the ad.
• Reinforce your credibility and trustworthiness - Use testimonials, press releases, product reviews etc.
• Make Good use of images and colour and have good clear designs - Good, colourful and excellent layout design can reinforced purchase intent and create a good impression, and so promote sales.
• Originality - Make sure your content is unique (absolutely unique) that can not be found on another site other wise your pages won't be indexed.
• Don't Request personal information - Unless necessary for the product or service that you're offering, don't request personal information.
• Have clear and easy to follow navigation - You need to encourage visitors to stroll and progress down that conversion path to buy from you or to click the adsense link. Provide a short and easy path for users to purchase or receive the product or offer in your ad.

Ways to increasing the click rate on Google Adsense ads on your Landing Page

• Place some ads towards the top of the page, not all at the bottom.
• Make sure you use text ads, because image ads are often distracting and most people ignore them. Text ads blend in with your own content and have a much higher CTR.
• Choose colours that match your site so your ads blend in better
• For short articles: place ads at the beginning and end of articles, with longer ones insert ads at a natural break in the article. Users will click on a text ad when they think it is part of the content, so blend the ads into your original material.
• Don’t add more than three Adsense ad units and three ad links, or two AdSense search boxes to your landing page.
• Go wider as wider gives better returns than thinner and always pick the "wide skyscraper" size.
• Use effective tools and software for your Google Adwords keyword research. This includes tools that spy on your competitors keywords.

Conclusion: Adsense sites require a fundamentally different approach that is focused search engine optimization and leaving holes in your content that are filled by the ads.

For more Information about Keywords and Seo see:

Boost your PageRank with Keyword in Domain Name

Channelling by Google Instant and Autocomplete threatens Longtail Keywords

Autocompletion a Game Changer for Search and Keyword Research

Free Lists of Niche Keywords for Websites, Blogs and Articles

Keyword Competition Tool : Free Online Analysis of Longtail Keywords

How to Optimize Keywords and SEO Titles - Use Popular Multiple Keywords

Keywords in Titles: Divide and Conquer or Longtail Keywords to Get Hits

Title Tag SEO Best Practices

© janderson99-HubPages