A landing page can be the first contact on your website from AdWords paid traffics, Social Media efforts, email campaigns and other offsite marketing activities. A company's marketing leaders often dictate the physical content and message and a balance needs to be made with the web design of the landing page. A well designed web landing page is the key to conversion, where conversions refer to any desirable form of interaction from the user such as sign-ups, registration, contact with your sales department or online purchases.

Design Elements

Certain Web Design elements that contribute to Quality Score by allowing a search engine spider to associate a keyword strongly with the landing page. Including your page headings and sub headings in H1 and H2 tags allow you to emphasis the keyword theme of a page. This also applies to text in bold, italic and underlined text. Including your keywords in good densities throughout the page also tie into the idea of emphasising a keyword theme.

Continuity

Regardless of the message continuity between the initial offer/enticement and the landing page are important. Following through with your message might mean setting up a new landing page which echoes message and visual elements of the enticement activity. For example if you have a Google AdWords Campaign running to promote a specific product category you would do be to choose the related product category page or to create a landing page which contains relevant content and links logically to individual products.

Clarity of Message

A simplified web design layout with a clear pitch works better than trying to overload the page with content. The soft-sell approach while emphasising KPI's (i.e.: product/services benefits) work best in combination with a simplified navigation bar.

Install Google Analytics Event tracking or Goals

If you cannot quantify the success of a campaign you will not be able to justify your marketing budget next time around or to fine-tune your efforts. While Google AdWords does have its own conversion tracking mechanism built-in it is a good idea to consider using the Google Analytics Goal conversions function instead. The reason for this is that you will be able to compare the conversion rates for paid and non-paid keywords alongside each other in the same report. Apart from judging keywords these Goal stats help to identify which pages convert more successfully than others. For example if your Signup form has a high abandonment rate then you may want to consider adding more enticement/assurance related content or reducing the number of fields in your form page.

Page Speed

A web design needs to be built with page load speed in mind. Google is placing more and more emphasis on loading speeds as part of their drive to focus on what creates a good experience for users.

Incidentally many of the above elements also improve the Quality Score on a PPC targeted keyword. Quality score is Google's way of rewarding relevant ad text, keywords and landing pages with a lower average Cost per Click. A well optimised of landing page and web design layout should serve a dual purpose of great quality scores and improved user conversions.