The Importance of Landing Page Alignment

Posted by Richard Stokes on May 5, 2007 to

Why great web design doesn't always pair well with good search engine marketing results.

Those of us who've been doing AdWords for awhile tend to underestimate the importance of landing pages on PPC performance. Perhaps this is because it's a relatively new twist on the PPC algorithm (this change was implemented in July '06), or perhaps it's just because we spend most of our time working on keyword expansion, ad copy optimization, and bidding strategies. But whatever the reason, it is clear that Google has made this a major factor in their algorithm.

Case in point, I have been recently working with a search marketer in the travel industry who has been trying to expand the focus of their site from one particular destination to a global travel portal. The regional site does well, generating between 60-100 clicks per day at an average CPC of only $.12 and a margin of about 30%.

This particular marketer realized if he could duplicate the same success on a global scale, he stands to generate huge revenues (and profits). His company created a brand-new design focused on a global market. Realizing that this could quickly become an enterprise app, they chose to rearchitect the site using .NET technologies and AJAX.

The new site is amazingly informative and far more usable than the old PHP site they were running on. Test users agreed that it was a big improvement over the old site.

However, Google didn't.

The company ran three test campaigns, including an exact duplicate of their previous PPC campaign. The average CPC rose to $.30 and traffic declined to less than 10 clicks per day (across three cities, not just one). The new site is a complete bust. Regardless of the fact that it provides a great user experience, it doesn't comply with Google's ideas of what makes a great site, and so it doesn't get the traffic.

So while there was no way to predict this in retrospect, it appears there are a few significant differences in the structure of these pages that are to blame:

• The average page size increased from 47k to 375k, an eight-fold increase.
• There is now a massive reliance on javascript to render the page correctly. Googlebots do not process javascript, so to test the effect of this on page rendering, we turned off javascript and rendered both the old and new sites. The old site rendered correctly, but some of the advanced search functionality no longer worked. This would obviously present no problem for a Googlebot. Not so for the new site ... it no longer rendered most of the text. The area and hotel descriptions were still in the page source, but could not be viewed in the browser. This probably appears to a Googlebot to look like cloaking, a very bad SEO practice.
• Because of the use of .NET, the new pages now contain nearly 85k of hidden binary code. This not only slows the page rendering down, but also dilutes the ratio of spider food the Googlebots are finding.

So my recommendations to this company were to remove the cool AJAX functionality, figure out ways to reduce the page size to less than 100k, and remove as much hidden binary data from the underlying HTML as possible. Finally, the next version of the site should be tested to ensure that a Googlebot will see visible text on the page which reflect the content of the site's PPC ads.

This example should serve as a reminder to everyone that you should be wary of trying to make up for bad site design decisions with great SEM marketing - sometimes, it just doesn't work.