Google Adwords landing page optimization tips

If you have been using Google Adwords you know how hard it is sometimes to rank high and pay low for certain keywords/keyphrases in certain niches.

Below you will find a list of Adwords optimization tips that will insure a high quality score of your Adwords landing pages. Just follow the tips below into implementing your landing sites and landing pages and you will definitely see Quality Score improvements:

1. Segment your keywords into similar and logical groups
2. Target each group of keywords to an individual landing page
3. Put the keywords into the page’s TITLE, H1, H2 tags, get a keyword density (for the targeted keyphrase) of around 2% in the page’s body and create links to and from the page, containing the keyphrase in the anchor text and title
4. Create a Privacy page, containing actual privacy policy text, taken from a similar website (with their permission of course) or generated with one of the many available privacy generators and link to it from all of the site’s pages
5. Create at least 3 pages with somewhat related content, but be careful not to copy full blocks of text in it, in order to not raise any duplicate content flags; from these pages link to your landing page, using the targeted keyphrase as anchor text (use 1-3 links, only slightly varying the anchor text of the links, or using similar keywords)
6. Create a Contact page, and link to it from all of the site’s pages; you can nofollow the links to the contact page, and be sure to add real contact information (if you want to keep your identity private, choose a name for yourself and open a free webmail account and a skype account)
7. Google loves links to authority websites, so be sure to create 2-3 links on the landing pages to a related topic on Wikipedia or a similar product on Amazon or something else like this
8. Create a sitemap of your website using a free sitemap generator and upload it to your site
9. Nothing good will come from adding your domain/website into Google Webmaster Tools, so DON’T! Instead ping Google with your landing site’s sitemap
10. Wait for your landing page to get indexed into Google organic results and then fire up your Adwords campaigns !

That’s about it ! Now you should pay less and get more traffic from your Google Adwords efforts.

One very important thing to emphasize here is that numbers 9 and 10 from the above list do not seem obvious at first, not many people recommend them, Google states that paid listings are not influenced by organic results and yet implementing #9 and #10 makes a BIG DIFFERENCE!

Google Advertising Professionals Program migration

Google is migrating all of our GAP data from our MCC accounts to the new

Adwords Professionals pages

You can basically access the same data you had in the MCC account, but you can also add and/or manage other GAP professionals linked to your account.

I’m guessing this is the first step into raising the awareness of the Google Advertising Professional (GAP) certification.

Also this could lead into a community (or social network) of GAP professionals looking for work or giving advice and clients seeking what GAPs have to offer…

I am GAIQ

Yes ladies and gentlemen, from this day on I am GAIQ (Google Analytics Individual Qualification).

I have passed the exam two minutes ago and you can see a copy of my certificate below:

Unfortunately Google does not provide a GAIQ certification logo like the one for Adwords Qualified Individual.

Overall the test was preety easy and if you’re using Google Analytics on a daily basis you should do ok. I studied for a weekend and passed with 98%. Also I should note that basic knowledge of the Google Adwords product and some advertising/online marketing terms will come in handy !

During the online exam the following will be useful to have a tab away:

1. A working Google Analytics account with some data in it (preferably with a profile that has E-commerce, Site-search and Adwords reporting enabled)
2. Search and replace filters
3. The Analytics Help website
4. The filter RegEx tool
5. Google Conversion University materials (which I watched two times before taking the exam)
6. optionally you could also have the Google Analytics Tracking API reference (I didn’t need it)

The exam has 70 questions in 90 minutes, of which some are multiple-choice multiple-answers, some are choose-two answers and most are single choice answers.

I found the time to be more than enough, having enough to review all the answers one more time before submitting. Upon graduation you’ll receive a downloadable PDF from the test website, which by the way is google.starttest.com. The certification is valid for 18 months since the passing date.

Good luck to anyone that’s attempting the GAIQ certification exam and drop me a line if you have questions, if you have passed the exam or if you think I can be of any help !