Look carefully enough at almost any success story, and you’ll be able to find another story lurking in the background, waiting to be brought into the light. Here are two completely unrelated but surprisingly similar examples.
Women, Businesses, and Sioux Falls
According to a national study of women in the workplace, Sioux Falls, South Dakota is one of the best places in the entire USA for a woman to work. The pay gap is smaller here than in most places, the rent is a reasonable percentage of what a woman can expect to make, and women make up more of the work force. (Places that rank better? Minneapolis, Fargo, Rochester MN, and Durham, North Carolina. That’s it!)
Why is that? Because of the businesses that are centered here. Women fill a lot of positions at Sanford Health, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup — big businesses that employ a lot of people and that find women particularly suited for the work they offer. With the right business background, Sioux Falls is able to find work suitable for more of our female population, and they, in turn, enrich our city.
Web Design, PPC, and Your Website
In exactly the same way, there’s a symbiotic relationship between web design, Pay-Per-Click Marketing (PPC), and the success of your website. Some websites are just better ‘towns’ for PPC to work in — but it’s not the business environment that decides that, it’s your web designer. The better the website, the more effective your PPC marketing campaigns are.
The Quality Score
That’s because AdWords and other major PPC marketing systems rely on a system that grades your websites, and sites that get better grades get better attributes on their advertisements. For Google’s AdWords, your site’s Quality Score is measured on a scale from 1 to 10, and the closer to 10 you are, the better your:
- Ad’s position within the ‘Sponsored Results’ block
- Prices per click
- Auction eligibility
- Available options/formats
The attributes that affect Quality Score are things like how relevant your advertisement is to the keyword that’s being searched for, that webpages’ specific history on AdWords, any geographic or device targeting you’ve done…and the quality of the landing page. That last one, in turn, includes factors like:
- How easy the page is to navigate
- How easy the page is to use for its intended purpose
- How relevant the website is to the keyword being searched for
In other words, a well-designed website that is seeking out PPC ads for a subject that is actually the one the website is built to address is more likely to succeed than one that isn’t. This shouldn’t be a huge leap for anyone who understands web design — Sioux Falls didn’t get to the top of the ‘women-friendly’ list by being full of strongly male-oriented businesses, either.
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