If you want to make Google richer without making any money yourself, then stop reading. You don't need to worry about conversion rates or landing pages. But if you want to grow your own revenue using search engine marketing, then you must pay attention to converting your clicks into leads.

This is the topic of my new article "Better B2B Landing Pages – A Case Study", now available as part of Search Engine Land's Strictly Business column.

Here’s a summary from the article of some of the strategies you can use to improve your pay-per-click landing page conversion rates:

Keep it simple. This goes for the form as well as the page. Enough said.

Remove the navigation. Every link you put on the page is an invitation to the customer to do something besides taking the action you want them to take. You’ve paid to get them to this page, so remove the distractions and make the conversion action obvious. Tip: test using a graphic element such as a big arrow to tell the prospect where to start.

Have reassuring elements. Every element on the page should serve only two purposes: 1) give the prospect reasons to convert and 2) resolve any concerns the prospect may have about converting. Clip art and visually appealing but generic photos of happy people don’t play a role here. Some of the elements that work on my sample page include the logo and tagline (World leader in the manufacture of thin section bearings), the cover shot of the whitepaper (with title blown up to be readable), and the sample excerpt from the paper (in this case, the table of contents).

Give prospects a reason to share correct information. Your prospects will to lie to you to get your offer without risking their privacy. (The #1 name submitted on lead generation forms is Mickey Mouse.) I have two tips to counteract this. First, ensure your privacy information is posted. Second, if your offer is a whitepaper or login code or anything else you can send, rather than fulfilling the offer on the thank you page, email them the fulfillment instead since it creates the incentive to share a valid address.

Check out the complete article, Better B2B Landing Pages – A Case Study.

Sponsored by: Landing Page Optimization software from Marketo, launching Monday, May 21st.