Increase Your Landing Page Relevancy With Domain Aliasing

In an earlier post, Amit covered the aspects of surviving Google’s “quality score”, and how you can avoid the nightmare of waking up and finding out that 75% of your keywords have been deactivated and now Google’s asking you for $5-$10 buck minimum bids. I wanted to expound on this a little and share my view on URL/landing page “relevancy” and some techniques you can use that not only target your potential customer on Google AND on your website, but also give the big “G” what they want:  relevant text ads and landing pages for their visitors.

Let’s look at the following example:

Johnny Affiliate has a site selling “widgets” and has setup his campaigns with tightly structured adgroups and keywords using the word “widget” in both his text ad and display URL to improve overall relevancy.

Adgroup: “Blue Widgets”

Keywords: “blue widgets, buy blue widgets, cheap blue widgets, etc…”

Landing Page: Johnny sends his visitors to a landing page selling “blue widgets”.

This is a common example of how a lot of affiliates structure their campaigns but in the never-ending quest to lower bid prices and stand above the competition, we need to go further.

So how could we improve on Johnny’s campaign/landing pages and become even more relevant?

Domain aliases for display URL’s and landing pages.

Purchasing multiple domains and setting up domain aliases is a quick way to become more relevant in the eyes of Google AND your potential customer. For example, Johnny could purchase “Blue-Widget-World.com, Red-Widget-World.com, etc.” and use these domain names for each seperate adgroup. The benefits to this is that his display URL is  targeted to the customer looking for “blue widgets” and his keywords are in the display URL as well, helping his overall Google relevancy.

So what is a “domain alias” and how do I set it up?

Domain aliasing allows additional domain names to lead to the exact same location of your original website. For example, if Johnny is hosting his domain name “widget-world.com” and added a domain alias for “blue-widget-world.com” on his web server, then “blue-widget-world.com” and “widget-world.com” would take the visitor to the exact same landing page as his original site “widget-world.com”. The difference being the domain name in the visitors browser window would reflect whatever domain name was used to send the visitor to his site.

We can make the same site become seperate “niche” sites, all with one code base. Most hosting companies provide a web panel for your hosting account which will allow you to add multiple domain aliases, and then re-direct them to your main site. The next trick is to display the matching domain name on your webpage. This can be done by setting a simple variable name.

For example, if your web host is running PHP, you could add the following code snippet at the top of your “index.php” landing page:

Now if the domain name Johnny used in his destination URL to send visitors to was “http://wwww.blue-widget-world.com”, the above code would recoginize the word “blue”in the domain name and set the “$DomainName” variable to match that domain -same thing with “http://wwww.red-widget-world.com” etc. If it doesn’t find the word “blue” or “red” in the URL, it will just default to Johnny’s main domain name, “widget-world.com”.

He can display the domain anywhere on his web pages simply by adding the code below:

<? echo $DomainName; ?>

The code: ‘”Welcome to <? echo $DomainName; ?>! We have thousands of widgets at 70% off!” would display to the vistor as: “Welcome to Blue-Widget-World.com! We have thousands of widgets at 70% off!” or “Welcome to Red-Widget-World.com! We have thousands of widgets at 70% off!”

Johnny can now send his “blue widget” customers to “blue-widget-world.com”, his “red widget” customers to “red-widget-world.com” etc. without having multiple websites. He has turned one website into multiple “niche” sites that target his customers directly.