This third and final post in the Quality Score series should provide you with a few ideas when to improving your current Quality Scores. Don’t settle with a Quality Score of seven or eight, set your sights higher and always aim for the top score.
To catch up on why exactly your quality score is so important you should take a look at my previous blog post – The Benefits of a Good Quality Score
This is the second post in the Quality Score series and covers probably the most important issue, in my opinion.
Once you are aware of the benefits of having keywords with high Quality Scores, you should have no problem with making the changes required to improve your scores.
Quality Score was introduced for Google AdWords to help Google decide which position an advertisers ad should be displayed and subsequently how much should be charged for each click on the ad.
Google assigns each keyword within an AdWords campaign with a score between 1 – 10 (1 being the lowest, 10 being the highest).
You have a well designed website with great content and you’ve decided to use paid search to increase the flow of quality traffic to it. You’ve created an AdWords advertising campaign in an attempt to get the most out of your website, but there’s an important factor when using AdWords that you need to consider.
Google AdWords try to present ads by relevance and quality. To ensure this, one of the things they do is to make an assessment of the ad and your website and give an AdWords quality score.
Google Adwords Quality Score
What kind of things affects the AdWords quality score?
The quality and performance of your landing page is a vital factor in Google AdWords determining your quality score. The benefits of having a good quality score are:
This means that your ads will cost less and your chances of being clicked on will improve. Without a good quality score, it will cost you more to get people to visit your site and there’s less chance of them finding you if your ad has a low ranking position.
So what can you do to improve the performance of your website and attain a better Google AdWords quality score?
Your website’s content always needs to be fresh, original and well written. This shouldn’t be new to you; content is king and always had been. Google assesses the quality, originality and relevance of your content against the ads you place. One final thing on content-relationship to ads, if you want a good quality score, it helps if the keywords in your ads appear on your website. That might seem obvious, but many people forget to do this.
Your site speed is also essential, slow loading pages will kill your quality score and put off human visitors alike. If your pages are full of heavy graphics files, slow loading Java Script or CSS feeds, you will damage your quality score. Strip back everything non-essential from your website landing page; keep it simple and to the point, your search engine and human visitors will appreciate it.
Likewise, if you’ve hosted your website on cheap, slow servers with a budget web hosting company, your quality score may also be badly affected. If your hosting service is providing you with poor server speeds, it’s time that you moved your site to a new host.
Remember, by making web pages that load quicker, you will save money on you AdWords campaign, and more people will stay longer on your website, increasing the chances of converting them from visitors to buyers.
Further Reading:
If you’re a Google AdWords advertiser, you’ve no doubt been affected in some way by Google’s Quality Score. This is the system within AdWords that rates a keyword “great”, “OK” or “poor”.
It is calculated using your keyword’s Click through Rate, the relevance of your ad copy and your landing page, i.e. the page that a searcher is taken to when clicking on one of your adverts.
What you may not appreciate is that having a poor quality score can cost you more than just pride. Those AdWords advertisers who create highly targeted campaigns benefit not only by higher conversion rates but they will also typically pay less for the click in the first place.
If you’re running your own AdWords campaign and it is littered with keywords flagged as “poor” it really is in your best interest to try and remedy the situation. This could mean deleting the keyword if you conclude that it is not appropriate or redesigning your landing page (or creating a new one) to improve the relevancy.
Google’s quality scoring system isn’t perfect and can sometimes leave even experienced AdWords users scratching their heads but to ignore it and do knowing is sure to end up costing you.
For more on this, watch Google’s introductory video on Quality Scores:
Depending on whether your glass is half-full or half-empty, Google’s policy from the beginning of April 2008 to include your landing page load time in your Quality Score will either be seen as an opportunity to do the right thing for your web pages or bury your head and curse AdWords for charging you more per click.
It sounds obvious but, if you’re an AdWords advertiser, you want to ensure that the page your visitors arrive at (the landing page) after they click on your advert is not only relevant to their search and gives them a clear sales funnel to follow but also loads quickly in their browser. The fact most Internet users are now Broadband enabled is still no excuse for bloated code, massive image files and unnecessary on-page clutter.
Although you should always strive for creating well optimised pages, Google is now going to add an extra incentive by rewarding its Pay per Click advertisers with lower minimum cost per clicks (CPC). Now that makes perfect sense to me!
More AdWords Tips.
