This week, search marketers are voting on the best SEM articles of 2009 in the annual SEMMY Award competition. If you’re involved in SEM at all, I highly recommend you read every single finalist’s article. They’re authored by a Who’s Who of SEM, and are a great “continuing education” resource for the industry.
If you’re doing PPC, I suggest you go to the Design & Usability category and read every article. “Why not the PPC category,” you may ask? Well, of course the PPC category is important, as well. However, I’ve found, especially lately, that many PPC advertisers need serious help with their landing pages.
Apparently Steve Baldwin from Did-It agrees with me. His MediaPost column from earlier this week covers 6 common landing page errors he found recently while he was searching for a particular item he wanted to buy. I don’t often side with Steve – it seems that frequently, his articles are intentionally contentious and take the “devil’s advocate” point of view. But this time, he’s spot on.
I wrote about good PPC landing pages for the Fluency Media blog a while back. You’ll find many of my recommendations are the same ones that are in Steve’s article. (Hey, maybe he copied me! Ha ha!)
Getting back to the SEMMYs, my favorite Design & Usability article is 25 Point Website Usability Checklist by Dr. Peter J. Meyers. It’s a comprehensive list of design & usability elements that every website owner should review before launching a new site or a site redesign. He covers accessibility, navigation, content, and other important website and landing page elements. Bookmark this article, and look at it the next time you’re designing a landing page.
There is one PPC SEMMY nominee covering landing pages, from my Twitter friend Saad Kamal. (BTW, even though it’s not quite Friday, he definitely gets one of my Follow Friday recommendations!) Saad’s article, entitled 9 Effective Tips for a Better Landing Page, gives very specific and detailed instructions on how to craft a landing page especially for PPC. Of course, his tips are great for web pages in general, but are especially helpful when it comes to PPC-specific landing pages. If you follow his suggestions, I guarantee you’ll get good conversion rates.
What are your best PPC landing page secrets? Share them in the comments!