You’ve probably heard the term Google Slap being thrown about when it comes to Adwords. It refers to the ‘slap’ against advertisers using the Adwords system that have a poor landing page.
You will know that you’ve been Google slapped if:
- Your ad ranking will drop, and sometimes not even show at all.
- Your CPC will go up significantly. It’s not usually to be asked to pay $10, $20 or even $50 for a click if you’ve been penalised.
And not only that, just recently thousands of advertisers got a warning from Google about having poor quality landing pages or worse, told that they had been permanently banned from the Google Adwords program.
No prior notice. Just a letter/email to say that they can no longer use the program. Ever.
If you have been lucky enough to just get a warning or haven’t had any problems then the most important thing you can do with your campaigns is to improve your landing page quality score. But how do you do that?
Obviously Google wants good quality, relevant pages. So you need to be able to give them what they want.
You can improve your landing page score by:
- Sending them to a page that contains the same information that the keywords and ad promises.
- It should contain unique content that is informative and relevant.
- If it is a page where the customer needs to purchase something, then it must not contain too many other unrelated products, and the main product should be the no. 1 focus.
- include links to an about me/company and a privacy policy page (essential if you are collecting personal information).
- it needs to be uncluttered, load fast and not contain errors.