October 7, 2008 by Matt Thomas
A lot of people with landing pages for pay per click campaigns come to us worrying about SEO and search engine ranking. We sit them down and calmly explain that this is one situation where they don’t need to worry about SEO. In fact, blocking their pages from being indexed at all might be an idea. Here’s why…
The first reason is duplicate content. Often you’ll have numerous pages with nearly identical content. You’ll only be changing small sections, to match a specific keyword for example. If every one of these pages were indexed you’d have a fairly serious duplicate content problem on your hands.
The second reason is testing. If you’re doing PPC right you’re going to be changing the page constantly – different colours, call-to-actions etc. till you find out the combination that gives you the maximum number of conversions. It’s going to look strange to the search engines if your page has a brand new title every time it is indexed.
You also need to consider conversions. Conversions are a PPC page’s only reason for existing and the things you need to do to encourage them are not the same things you need for SEO. This makes PPC pages difficult to optimise for search engines.
Finally, you need to think about your limited offers. Many PPC sites offer special, time-limited promotions. Because it can be hard to remove your landing page from the organic search results, you could be getting hassle from customers trying to take advantage of the offer years after it expired.
I hope that helps. Just remember PPC and SEO are different arts entirely, what works for one will not necessarily work for the other.
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Pingback by Should pay per click Landing Pages be optimised for Search Engines? — October 7, 2008 @ 12:29 pm
I would recommend split testing the lanidng pages for quality score benefits alone! by improving the CTR the quality score will rise resuilting in lower CPC, an advantage in anyones eyes.
Comment by Philis Youngis — January 26, 2009 @ 5:19 pm