While I think today’s article on the Small Business Branding blog was well-intentioned, it unfortunately overlooked the importance of great landing pages. To be honest, Google doesn’t do the best job of educating its users on the importance of landing pages either, so it’s not surprising that their importance hasn’t been given it’s due in other conversations about search marketing. Before you go beating your head against a wall and wind up paying for help with Adwords, let’s explore how to effectively use landing pages to make your pay-per-click marketing more cost-effective and better in general.

Google Adwords pay-per-click advertising (or PPC advertising as you may see it called) is the most widely used search by both advertisers and consumers, so to make it work for you it’s really important to get what makes Google Adwords tick. Adwords’ goal is to show its users the most relevant ads possible. The idea is that if they do this, the most clicks will take place and Google will make the most money. Your goal is to convince the Google robots that your page is relevant to the keywords you want to have people search to find you. When you manage to do this, Google Adwords rewards you by offering you a cheaper pay-per-click price than your competitors and a better placement for your ads.

So how exactly do you go about convincing the robots to love you and getting these cheap clicks? By writing landing pages that make use of the keywords you want used. Here’s a step-by-step to creating the best landing pages for your campaigns.

1. Do your homework
Let’s say I wanted run an Adwords campaign to get people to read this post. My first step would actually be to do a little research with Google’s keyword tool. I’d want to know how people were searching Google to learn about using Adwords effectively. I’d identify keywords such as “adwords advertising” and “internet marketing” and “pay per click”.

2. Write keyword-rich copy
Once I’d made a list of words people commonly search to get the information in my article, I’d start writing. (Google’s keyword tool will tell you how often people search for the keywords you’re interested in. It will also tell you how sought-after the words are by other advertisers.) As I write, I need to keep my list of keywords in mind and be sure to make liberal use of them in my copy. When the Adwords robots scan my page they’ll be checking to see if the keywords I put in my campaign are on my landing page and if so, how often they appear. The better job I do of using my targeted keywords, the more likely I am to be offered a lower cost-per-click price and better ad placement.

3. Set up the landing page
Adwords likes URLs that are related to your keywords. If I wanted to use this blog post as a landing page I’d make a URL for it that went something like http://brandtorrent.com/adwords_secrets/.

4. Create smart ad campaign copy
At this point a lot of the hard stuff is done. Keywords have been selected and a juicy landing page has been written and created. The only challenge left is writing ad copy that makes people want to click. So think about the people you want clicking on your ad. What is it that you have to offer that will interest them the most? Can you boast about low prices, free shipping, and/or unique selection? Whatever you’ve got to excite your audience, that’s what goes into the ad campaign copy. You’re actually better off developing a couple of versions of your ad copy so you can do what’s called A/B testing. What this means is Adwords will run both ads for you and you’ll see which version is getting a better click-through-rate. This enables you to really maximize the success of your campaign.

5. Monitor and Adjust
Search engine marketing is a tricky science, so no matter how smartly you’ve crafted your landing page and your ad copy, you’ll need to keep an eye on performance and make adjustments as you go along.

I realize some marketers might think sharing this type of information with the small business owner is counterproductive. Why not keep ‘em in the dark and lead them down a semi-sabotaging path so they’ve got to turn to a pro for help? I am not saying hiring a search engine marketing professional doesn’t have its time and place. Developing a great Adwords campaign requires writing skills and time and effort. If you haven’t got the time or writing resources for DIY marketing, by all means, hire help. Search marketers not only understand these tricks of the trade, they’ve got loads of experience working with them. My goal here is to empower the little guy to make a go of this on his or her own. Because let’s face it, no matter how great pro marketers are, they’re just not always in the budget.

P.S. For extra credit, check out “Eight Keyword Research Mistakes That Are Costing You Money” from Search Engine land and “Pay Per Click Mistakes Newbies Make” from Pay Per Click Journal.