Creating Content

Content is probably the single most important part of any affiliate landing page. Beyond making your page interesting for visitors, sourcing appropriate and original content allows you to:

• Raise your Google Quality Score (which can decrease the cost of AdWords or improve your ad position)
• Reinforce that your visitors are on the right page
• Build trust with your visitors
• Enhance your possibilities for organic search hits

The key aspects of content for your affiliate landing pages that you’ll need to keep track of are:

1. Original & Relevant Content

When a visitor arrives at your site you want to give them the sense they have come to the right place.  This is particularly important when you’re using Google AdWords.  The last thing that you want your visitors to do when they hit your site is to immediately bounce back to the search results.

Original, quality content plays a huge part in ensuring this doesn’t happen. The content of the page should communicate clearly to your visitors that they have found what they were looking for — in effect, proving to them that they have hit the appropriate page for their needs.

Every visitor to your site is looking for something, so if you deliver content and offers that are closely matched to what they are looking for, you will keep them on the site longer and encourage them to engage with the content. This ultimately leads to more purchases of the products you are offering.

So, it is of paramount importance that your site contain the keywords you are targeting and the keywords that appear in your ads.  In addition, make sure that the content displayed on each page gives the visitor the feeling that, finally, they have found what they are looking for, by making your copy relevant to the product and its audience.

Google rewards this approach, placing it under the category of “creating a good user experience”.  Google will raise your Quality Score (i.e., decrease your charge for AdWords clicks) if visitors are NOT regularly bouncing from your site.  A user who stays on the site is an indication that they are finding what they are looking for and having a positive user experience. Consistency between your PPC keywords, the displayed ad and your landing page is one key feature that ensures people will indeed find what they are looking for, thus increasing your conversion rate and increasing revenue.

Tip: Don’t Duplicate

One thing that the search engines have had to deal with is duplicate content.  With many programs on the market that allow people to copy entire websites word-for-word, it is difficult to stop people from stealing the content that you have created or paid for. Sometimes, this puts search engines into a difficult position when they find duplicate content, whose content do they rank highest.

In some cases, this can result in sites being removed from the search engine index, having an AdSense account suspended or even worse for the affiliate marketer having your site blacklisted as being made of duplicate content.  It cannot be emphasized enough, unique and original content is crucial to the success of your site.  As is keeping an eye on competitors for those who would copy your work and reporting cases of plagiarism to the search engines.

2. Keyword Density

Google makes their own automated judgment regarding how relevant your page content is to the PPC keywords that you are purchasing . Generally, these checks are done by spidering the page content and measuring how that content relates to your selected keywords.  The result becomes your Quality Score: If Google’s analysis of your landing page and keywords shows that they are well correlated, this will be reflected in a higher Quality Score and ultimately better search rankings.

So how exactly does Google analyze your pages to see if they match up with your keywords? One of the metrics they use is keyword density.

Even though keyword density has a bit of a spotted past, when done properly it remains a key factor in creating quality searchable content. In earlier days many websites were able to achieve significant search engine rankings by aiming solely for high keyword density in their writing, or worse, using a technique called keyword stuffing. This approach sacrifices style, readability and relevance for raw keyword quantity. Search engines have repeatedly told us that this behavior will not be rewarded.

Major search engines want to make sure that they are providing links to content that is natural sounding, readable, and informative. So while we recognize that writers should not apply keyword density “at all costs”, you should be sensitive to the density of keywords you are targeting with your PPC ads and make sure to create (or purchase) content that is well aligned with those keywords.  It’s also important to mention that keywords are not just single words but are in fact keyword phrases, and keyword phrases can be of any length.

3. Transparency & Trust

One of the most difficult things in the e-commerce world is building trust with visitors so that people are willing to get out their credit card and make a purchase from your site.  In the space of the first few seconds visitors need to develop enough trust to believe that the site they are visiting is not only what they are looking for, but also that it is a trust worthy site where the information and products can be trusted.

This means that articles need to be written with enough authority that they will be taken seriously, and that they contain an authentic voice that people can trust.  One aspect of developing this relationship is to have well-written content that is free from grammatical and spelling errors.  Specific examples to support claims and testimonials are also very helpful. The more informative the content is the more likely the visitor is to trust your recommendations, download the products you recommend and make a purchase of the product.

4. Navigability

The key to converting visitors into customers is making it easy for users to find what they’re looking for. Here’s what Google advises for meeting the navigability criteria:

• Provide a short and easy path for users to purchase or receive the product or offer in your ad
• Avoid excessive use of pop ups, pop-unders, and other obtrusive elements throughout your site
• Make sure that your landing page loads quickly
• Learn ways to improve your load time