PPC Advertising: Four Tips For Raising Your Keyword Quality Score
By Anna Johnson on December 6th, 2009Writing in the Search Marketing Standard, Chris Stiner has provided four great tips for paid search marketers wanting to raise their keyword quality scores and have their ads rank higher, for less cost, in the paid search listings on Google.
Apart from click-through rate and competitive bidding, the per-click cost of buying a keyword on Google Adwords is essentially determined by its quality score. Google calculates the quality score for a given keyword based on the landing page that a Google search engine user sees after clicking on the ad.
Chris’s four tips are as follows:
1. Relevance – ensure your landing page is relevant to the ad. As you might imagine, this also makes complete sense from a marketing point of view. If someone is searching on ‘dog collars’ and your ad promotes ‘dog collars’… then you want the destination URL i.e. your landing page to highlight dog collars too! It should NOT be your pet store’s home page or a catalog page for dog food. Your landing page should clearly match both the ad and the search.
2. Navigation – Chris says your landing page should provide the shortest path possible between the offer or product in your ad and the corresponding offer or product. To this end, you want to avoid having distracting navigational elements or anything – such as pop-ups / pop-unders – that get in the way of the search engine user getting what you promised in your ad.
3. Landing page load time – part of optimizing your landing page navigation is to ensure a minimal load time. Again, this makes practical sense too – the longer people have to wait to see your page, the more likely they’ll be to leave without waiting.
4. Transparency – according to Chris Stiner, you also want to provide helpful information about your business to your visitors. This may involve providing links to ‘about us’ or ‘contact us’ pages, as well as your privacy policy and legal terms.
Interestingly, Chris is adamant that you should not require people to register (i.e. fill in a form) to see more content on your website as this reduces trust and will negatively impact your quality score.
This principle doesn’t apply in all cases, though. As many direct response Internet marketers will attest, it’s certainly possible to have an optin form on your landing page and still have a healthy quality score. In these cases, the extent to which you can require visitors to go through a registration or optin form largely depends on how well you’ve followed the other principles of relevance, navigation and landing page load time.
For example, if your Google Adwords ad is promoting a webinar and your landing page provides details of the webinar, then it only makes sense to include a registration form for people wanting to sign up for the webinar.
