How many times have you been on Google AdWords and even after optimizing everything you could possibly think of, still find your CPC is too high? Well, there may be one area of optimization you haven’t considered—landing pages.

Google ranks accounts on a scale of 1-10, based of the quality and relevance of your keywords and PPC ads—to determine your CPC. Accounts with a quality score of 6 or higher receive a 16-50% decrease in CPC, while accounts with a quality score of 4 or lower see a 25-400% increase in CPC.

Having a high ranking—built by high-quality, relevant keywords and PPC ads—is one way to reduce CPC, but in order to fully optimize your landing pages, there are six more factors to consider:

1. Be relevant

Ensuring your landing pages and copy are relevant to your ads and keywords is critical—by matching the content being searched and the intent of the search, you prove to Google that your ads are helpful and not misleading to searchers.

2. Make landing page copy appealing

If your landing page copy isn’t relevant, interesting, and attention-grabbing, you’re wasting money on CPC. Boring landing page copy leads to bounced site visits—and wasted CPC dollars. Give your copy a boost by aiming for an emotional appeal—rather than just straight information—to encourage audiences to stay on the page and increase their chances of filling in a form or clicking a call-to-action.

3. Focus

Reduce unwanted or irrelevant clicks on your PPC campaigns, by limiting the focus of your ads. Instead of spreading your message across multiple problems, solutions, or value propositions, stick to a central, powerful message. By zeroing in on one message, you not only increase conversions, but also decrease money spent on useless clicks.

4. Instill trust

Trust is difficult to gain and easy to lose, but it’s also a central part of improving PPC campaign performance. If people feel your landing pages are untrustworthy or seem spammy, they’re more likely to bounce. Luckily, there are a few simple tactics that can give your landing pages an immediate trust boost:

• share information about your company—including what you do, who works for the company, and who already trusts you
• add social proof like customer testimonials and press mentions that speak to the quality of your work
• include trust elements such as guarantees or security badges, to prove your company is worthy of user trust

5. Update your design

Dated designs immediately make your landing pages look less trustworthy. Fresh, current designs not only capture (and keep) user attention, they also ensure the page’s usability and readability are up to today’s web standards. Between fewer bounces and more engagement, design plays as important a role as copy in improving landing page performance.

6. Decrease page load time

Users lose interest quickly, so if your page is taking a long time to load, it’s likely that they’ll bounce. Consistently high bounce rates alert Google to poor landing page user-experience, which negatively impacts your Ad Rank. For faster load times, be sure to take into account all page elements, by: optimizing images, minifying CSS and Javascript files, and using browser caching.

By leveraging all of these tactics, you’ll be able to optimize your landing pages to get the most out of every click—and reduce your CPC.

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