Local pages reduce click costs by 12% for Hörmann

The online marketing world never sits still and, as a business, that's something you need to keep in mind. Businesses who want to stay on top of their marketing game need to keep a close eye on every part of their strategy and optimise where necessary. Two key factors of this strategy are your ads and quality score.

SEO is all about ads. After all, an organic SEO campaign takes time to get results. If you want to give the campaign an additional boost, you need to focus on ads. And setting up ads means taking into account the CPC, or cost per click. This is the price you pay as an advertiser, every time someone clicks on your company's ad in the SERPs.

Once your ads are launched, of course you want to know if they are working. Google Ads has a handy little tool for this: the quality score (QS). This diagnostic tool indicates how good your ad quality is, based on a score between 1 and 10. The higher your score, the better your ad and landing page matches the search query.

Think carefully about the keywords you want to use in your ads. There's no point blindly choosing words just because they score well. Because if they don't fit well with the content of the page they relate to, you'll pay more per click and the Click-Through Rate (CTR) will be low. Consequently, Google gives you a lower quality score. The reverse is also true, of course. Well-chosen keywords are rewarded with a higher CTR, a lower cost per click and therefore a nice quality score too.

Suppose you chose a particular word to advertise on, but you notice that the CTR and quality score are still low. Then there's a good chance you have focused on the wrong word, as mentioned above. On the other hand, it is also possible that the page it links to is not optimised. For example, if you choose to advertise on the words "buying a car," but those words do not appear anywhere on the page in question, then of course it is not surprising that Google will tap you on the knuckles.

Besides the relevance of your keyword and the content of your page, user-friendliness on page also counts as a factor for your quality score. Indeed, a user has little use for an ad that redirects to a website that is not user-friendly. For example, a slow-loading page, missing or unclear buttons, errors when you click and so on.

So optimising your ads and pages does take some time and effort. Especially when you want to focus on local search, it's a must. Suppose you want to offer a product or service in different, specific locations, then it's advisable to create a unique landing page for each of those locations . For example, when someone in Ghent searches for "buying a car in Ghent", a page will appear that actually references that location as well. If you then want to advertise on that page, the CPC is reduced because the page is a nice match with the search query.

Only, there is one big "but". Because if you want to create unique pages for, say, all locations in Belgium, you need to have quite a bit of time AND money to spare. Have your copywriter write hundreds or thousands of unique local pages that also have good (local) SEO value. For a human, it is impossible work, but not for Tailpage.

Let's look at the case of Hörmann - one of our first customers - for a concrete example. Hörmann is a German family-owned company that has been a leading European player in garage doors, front doors and operators for decades. They naturally want to continue this success not only at the European and national level, but also at the local level.Their products, especially garage doors, are often the subject of local searches. After all, people don't want to scour the entire country for a garage door installer. On the contrary, they want to know where they can find a professional in their area, or where they can see some garage doors with their own eyes in a showroom.

Using extensive keyword analysis, we found that - in Hörmann's case - many people search for "garage doors" in combination with a municipality. However, until recently, the landing page that people searching with that search query landed on was a piece of content about the more general keyword "garage doors." Despite Hörmann's efforts to advertise on this page, it didn't generate much for them. Indeed, the search term did not fully match the content of the page. As a result, the page had a low quality score and a high cost per click.

Using the Tailpage tool, this all changed. We generated local pages based on this keyword with unique, relevant content for every possible location in Belgium. Then we also advertised on these.

Since Hörmann's ads now lead to a landing page about garage doors as well as the location searched, Google assigns the Tailpage pages a quality score that is 11% higher than other campaigns. The cost per click has fallen by about 12%!

In addition, the Hörmann case also proves that the Tailpage approach has generated conversions. In mid-April 2021, Hörmann started advertising on Tailpage pages. Two months later, in mid-June, the results spoke for themselves. The conversion rate of the Tailpage pages is around 20%. In reality, that percentage is a bit higher. Indeed, the goal of 'dealer search' is already achieved when a Tailpage page is visited, as the three closest dealers are automatically displayed. Moreover, the conversion rate of the Tailpage pages is also 5% higher than that of the Hörmann website as a whole.

Hörmann's results therefore speak for themselves. Optimised local SEO landing pages and associated ads can do wonders for your quality score, CPCs and conversions. A triple win!