To round out Week 2 of the TriMark Solutions April Blog Event, I will be providing advice on how to achieve top landing page quality scores through proper keyword management.
Quality Score is a 1-10 score, determined by Google, based on your keyword clickthrough rate (CTR) combined with the relevance of your ad text, keyword(s), and landing page. Advertisers cannot control the pre-established CTR, however they can optimize the ad text, keyword, and landing page. Understanding Quality Score can be a bit complicated, so Google explains it very well in the AdWords Help Center.
The most important thing to remember is that keyword and landing page relevancy is not determined by a human. There are far too many PPC campaigns being created every day for Google staff to keep up with. Instead Google has adopted a complex relevancy scoring bot, much like the algorithm robot which indexes and ranks websites. Therefore, landing page, keyword, and ad group relevancy is seen as objective by Google, while it may seem very subjective to human eyes.
Stay Relevant!
The best advice for achieving high PPC relevancy is to stay consistent within your keywords, ads, ad groups, and landing pages. For example, if “Purple Widgets” is your keyword, and your ad text includes, “Buy Purple Widgets”, then your landing page should not be your homepage, which lists all your various widgets. It should also not be the page you have devoted to orange or green widgets. Your landing page needs to be all about purple widgets, including fresh, unique, non-duplicate content regarding said widgets.
Sometimes Less is More
The more filler and unimportant details you fluff your content with, the less helpful it is in the eyes of Googlebots. A very simple landing page regarding purple widgets (their uses, their characteristics, and how to buy them) is considered much more relevant than a page describing the history of purple widgets, why they are better than red widgets, and why other widgets failed when purple widgets were released. At first, this may not make sense, however all the extra content isn’t as relevant to someone looking to quickly buy a product, which is often why Google may grade such a site with a lower quality score. I have seen many landing pages with simply too much content, which were ranked QS of 7 or 8, while a shorter, more to the point landing page for the exact same product gets a 9 or 10 quality score.
Test, Test, TEST!
Unfortunately for PPC advertisers, there is no concrete template for achieving a 10/10 Perfect Quality Score. No PPC advertiser can achieve such a score on every AdWords campaign, so if they say they can, turn and walk away. The best thing you can do as a PPC advertiser is try out what you think is best, watch the results, and make adjustments accordingly. Expect to spend a few bucks before you maximize you CTR and Conversion rates. Ultimately, you are always going to need to test and refine any PPC campaign, because your (potential) customers are the only ones who can decide your success rates.
This concludes Week 2 of the April Blogging Event! I am very excited to announce that we will be having a guest poster during Week 3, TriMark Solutions’ very own Daniel Hurst, Director of Search Marketing. Daniel will be discussing SEO Best Practices and Guidelines. He will be covering a wide variety of topics, I hope you stop by to check it out, it’s gonna be very informational! See everyone next week!
