In the first half of 2011, Google launched a substantial algorithm change known as ‘Farmer’ or ‘Panda’, aimed at identifying low-quality content and websites. In recent years, the ubiquity of content farms has grown. These are sites where the text may be relevant to a certain query, but fairly useless to users, with a poor user experience. These content farms are a prime example of content being written for SEO and ranking purposes, rather than actually helping the searcher.

Google calls this Panda release a ‘high quality sites algorithm’. This blog post is not about Panda, there are likely hundreds of top quality posts on this topic in the blogosphere.

What Landing Page Quality?

Paid search has its own brand of spammers, notably the affiliate marketer that bids up search queries and thus raises average cost per click and sends searchers to subpar landing pages. Interestingly, you could call affiliates a necessary evil in that companies, although not always supportive of their methodologies, still employ their services.

But, I’m not even talking about affiliates here. I’m talking about advertisers themselves, who bid on keywords and whether through a poor match type strategy or lacklustre marketing execution (or both), seem to drive searchers to the most pointless pages. Paid search ads are driven to pages that offer so little value, it is a surprise that the company is paying for the click at all.

I’m talking about pages that lack insightful information, without a clear call-to-action or poor navigation. Pages with newsletter offers, sales pitches and ‘why we’re so great’ downloads that do not give the searcher an iota of objective perspective from which to better frame their purchase decision.

Give & Take Bargain

Perhaps the worst thing about all of this, is that despite driving searchers to such uninspiring offers, companies still expect to see results and then act genuinely surprised when these do not transpire.

Back in the day when landing pages first started to make it into the paid search strategy,  a targeted page was crafted to fit a searcher’s query, offer information and provide a meaningful, useful offer in exchange for the searcher’s contact information. The theory behind this balance was that a relationship of mutual benefit was being forged in which both parties benefited from the transaction. The searcher received valuable information and the company had the opportunity to continue to pursue a relationship with the searcher.

Today, however, companies seem to have lost sight of their end of the bargain. Any old offer is thrown up based on what is already in the company’s repertoire versus crafting something that will add value.

In a tight economy, with a workforce that has been cut back in many companies, perhaps resources are a factor here. If a company launched a rubbish TV campaign, the returns would be poor and hopefully executives would recognise the marketing medium’s failure because of a poor campaign rather than faulting the medium itself.

In paid search though, very often the scapegoat is the paid search agency or in-house online marketer. Somehow, paid search specialists have now become marketing consultants and brand specialists, having to advise companies on the type of offer they should use, often assisting with the content and trying to answer the question, ‘what would a searcher in this industry find useful?’

Accountability Please

Where’s the accountability? Paid search marketers are responsible for the success of the paid search campaign, but what about the company marketing managers, surely they should know what type of online assets their prospects would find useful. They should know what questions prospects ask and would like answered.

So why do they provide second rate online assets and expect a return on their investment?

Here are some tips for search pages following the Panda update. This is nothing new, we’ve heard it all before, but marketing managers would be well advised to think about these elements when designing landing page offers for paid search campaigns:

• Is it obvious what topic the page is about?
• Is the content original or is it aggregated from other sources?
• When looking objectively at the page, is the primary focus the user need or the business goal?
• Is the content on the page authoritative and valuable? Does it answer the query better than other pages on the web?
• If some of the pages on the site are very high quality and engaging, are other pages on the site not as high quality?