Why Your PPC Landing Pages Should Be Part of Your Website
In the world of legal marketing, we see a general push from our clients to have more than one website. We constantly see law firms with a website for each practice area, or, in this case, separate websites for general use and PPC landing pages. So we reopen the age-old debate – should your law firm have more than one website, specifically for PPC vs non-PPC purposes?
Separate domains for PPC landing pages
When running PPC campaigns, we’ve heard the experts urge us to have landing pages that are relevant and specific to the content mentioned in your add. But how to you integrate that content into your existing site, if it’s not there already? This dilemma becomes increasingly difficult when you are running more and more PPC campaigns – where do you put these pages?
An answer some are turning to – separate domains. For example, these sites below. On the left is the law firms “normal” website, on the right, their PPC website.
Is this a good idea? Our stance, no.
Four Reasons to Have One Website for Your Business
- Google says so. Google does not like duplicate content. It has said so here. And if you weren’t convinced, Google releases algorithm updates like Panda that beat sites with duplicate content into a pulp. By having two websites discussing your law firm and a specific area of practice (lemon law, in this case) you’re bound to have nearly identical content. There is only so many ways you can say “we will help you with your lemon law case.”
- You’ll get more traffic. Having two websites is means you’re self-cannibalizing your traffic. Business school beat “synergy” into me – the idea that 1 + 1 can sometimes equal 3. The same concept applies here. Sure, you get traffic on your main site. And you get traffic on your PPC landing pages site. But chances are, if you consolidated the two, you’d get more traffic than the sum of them separately. And more traffic -> more clients -> more money -> happy you.
- Improve your ROI. The more websites you maintain, the more money you spend. You need to buy each additional domain, pay for hosting,
- Better user experience. Imagine this: your car sucks, desperately you do a Google search for a lawyer. You click a brilliantly constructed ad, and get taken to a site relevant to your search query. It’s all good so far. But then, you, the not-dummy you are, decide to poke around this site. Sure, there’s some content, but it seems weak. So you leave this crappy website because it doesn’t quite seem legit.
Consolidate Your Websites and Live a Longer, Happier Life
Seriously. Just do it. You’ll save money, probably see an uptick in traffic, and build some karma in the Google Gods book.
Interesting article. I didn’t know law firms were actually creating separate sites just for PPC. Separate pages, sure. But separate sites? For firms that want to keep their PPC landing pages out of the mix of pages on their main site (perhaps because they are worried about duplicate content), can they use a meta noindex tag on the page and a disallow line in the robots.txt file?
You would be amazed how frequently we deal with this…. and a pretty good business model for agencies who build websites but no value to the law firm. It’s utterly bananas.
What the heck does “PPC” stand for?
Pay Per Click!