How to Improve Your Quality Score

This series of articles looks at how to improve your quality score within Google in order to optimise your Adwords advertising. Improve your quality score and pay less per click and get your ads ranked higher.

Google’s Quality Score

If you have been running any Google Adwords campaigns you will know that Google assigns a Quality Score (QS) ranking against your keywords: Great; OK; Poor. This has a major impact on both your minimum cost per click (CPC) and your ad’s ranking on the search pages.

It goes without saying that you will pay less per click and your ads will be ranked higher if you Quality Score is ‘great’ rather than ‘poor’ or ‘OK’. So how do you achieve that?

Well the first thing to remember is that this is an ongoing process with Google (and all the other major search engines) to improve their customer’s search experience. In short Google, want people to be able to run a search and then find relevant information as a result of that search. Sounds simple, right?

This process began in 2006 and will continue to be refined over time. The first of the so called ‘Google slaps’ focused on ‘one page’ websites that provided little information to the searcher other than a link to a merchant page.

Thousands of these pages disappeared overnight as the minimum CPC was racked up to $10 and above, forcing many Internet Marketers to re-think their campaigns or exit the business altogether.

Create a Mini-Site

The initial answer was to create a mini-site based around the original landing page. So, a Home page was added, a contact page, an information page, etc. and this remains an effective strategy today. The idea being that your mini-site itself appeared more relevant to the search engines and was therefore given a higher QS. This in turn leads to lower CPC and higher ranking.

That’s not to say your landing page is not relevant, indeed it must be.

You should always use the ‘common keyword technique’ when setting up your ad groups, writing your ad copy as well as the actual copy on your landing page. So, if you are advertising ‘sausage making’ that keyword phrase should be prominent throughout.

In the next article I look at how you can expand this ‘mini-site with a landing page’ model and further improve your quality score using multiple landing pages.

Dave B