Recent changes at Google have left many companies facing difficult decisions about their strategies. Google has introduced a new variable into how it works out where to place your PPC ad. The new variable concerns landing page quality.

What this means in effect is that, all other things being equal, if you have an ad with a 'poor quality' landing page you will need to bid more to get it as high as and ad with a 'good quality' landing page. And what is 'good' in this case? The answer is relevancy. If it ain't relevant, it ain't worth a ... top position.

But what is 'good'? The answer is relevancy.

Google's motives here are also good. They want to encourage companies to produce landing pages that meet the expectations of users to improve the user experience that the ad directs them to.

Practically, it should be obvious to a good search marketer when 'landing page quality' is poor - the result will be high traffic and low conversion. But the culture of the company can have an impact. With ownership of search in the hands of marketers, and ownership of website in the hands of e-commerce, search marketers often will pursue traffic regardless of conversion, and consequently e-commerce have to be content with badly qualified leads.

But with Google's move towards relevancy, search marketers will now need to work with site owners to design in relevancy and usability on landing pages and make the experience join up. Or they face big increases in spend to retain PPC position. And this has to be right - what is the point of clickthroughs to irrelevant pages? Landing pages are opening conversations, and it makes commercial sense to design them to discourage dropout and persuade users.

So, how about this for a template for radical search marketing design?

1. Design creative and copy for your landing page that perfectly describes your product and has a clear persuasive call to action.
2. Design your Adwords creatives that reflects your landing page.
3. Test combinations of landing pages and Adwords creatives with users, using a 'blink' methodology.
4. Pick your keywords, set your Adgroups, run your campaign.

Perhaps we been doing things backwards all along? Thanks Google for setting us right!