Quality score is Google’s way of calculating each of your keywords importance to what you’re doing. It measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad text, to a users search query, your landing page, how fast your website loads, what keywords are on your landing page and a variety of other factors. The following are 8 tips to help you improve your quality scores and get more conversions. If you would like to know more about PPC, check out all our articles here.
Check Your Quality Scores
My number one and most important tip to improve quality scores it to know what they are. You need to know if you are bidding on a keyword that has a quality score of one out of ten. You need to know what’s going on with your account. Below is how you find them:
- Sign into your Adwords account.
- Select the campaign that you’re working on.
- Click the Keywords tab.
- Click on Columns in the toolbar right below the Keywords tab that you just clicked.
- Click Customize columns.
- Select the Qual. score box, you will see a little check mark after you have checked it.
- Click Save when you’re done. Now you should see the quality score.
Make AdGroups Tightly Themed
Having all your keywords in tightly organized keywords will help you to get much better quality scores. I personally like to only have 2-5 different keywords in each AdGroup as to not have too many keywords per group of ads. If one of your keywords doesn’t match the other keywords in the AdGroup you should create another AdGroup for that specific keyword. I have had several keywords in their own AdGroup before due to the fact that they didn’t match any other keyword in any other group. This isn’t a bad thing, it just means that you’re being more organized. This will significantly help boost up your quality score.
Place Misspelled Keywords into their own AdGroups
When you are putting together your tightly themed groups make sure to create a separate group for your misspelled keywords. I have found that when I do this it helps not destroy the reputation of an AdGroup with all good words and one misspelled keyword. By doing this you will keep the overall quality of the AdGroup up and get better quality scores out of both groups. It will also allow you to put up and write ads with the misspelled keywords. Though your landing page won’t be misspelled, you will have better quality scores with the misspelled keywords because of the ads you write.
Target Specific Ad Copy for Each AdGroup
Each group should have different ad copy. You should organize each AdGroup with 2 different ads that are targeted and written specifically for that one AdGroup. By doing this and keeping the keywords per AdGroup low you will help the overall quality score of all the keywords in the group. Your ads will match all the keywords in the group. If one of your keywords doesn’t match the specific ad, create a new AdGroup for that specific keyword.
Landing Pages for Specific AdGroups
Every AdGroup should have a specific landing page. Keep in mind that each one doesn’t have to be a new page, it can be an existing page that you have on the site. But it should be specifically about what keywords you’re bidding on and contain the keywords on the page that you’re bidding on.
Always Have Two Ads Running
You should always be testing everything that you’re doing. Having two different ads running at the same time will help you to know which ad is converting better and allow you to convert better. This will allow you to spend more money. When you have more money, can create better and more targeted landing pages which will help get better quality scores!
Place Keywords on Landing Pages
If you are sending everyone to your main page of your website you need to stop. You should have specific landing pages on your site that are setup specifically for the keywords and AdGroups that you’re working on. By doing this it will not only improve your quality score but it will improve your conversions, bounce rate, time on site, and all other aspects that you should be tracking. One thing to keep in mind when you are putting together the page is not to keyword stack the page. You don’t want 100 different keywords that you’re going after on the same page. Keep it to 5-10 on a pretty decent, content rich page. If you can keep it in the 3-5 keyword phrases per landing page.
If Something Doesn’t Look Right, Call Google
I’ve had several times where a clients keywords are getting low quality score because they match a trending subject or popular band. In this case if all your quality scores are down, get Google on the phone and explain your problem to them. They will tell you that there is really nothing that you can do but the’ll look into it. Magically, every time I have done that my quality scores have gone up in the next 5-10 days.
Improving your quality scores isn’t brain science. If you follow the tips above you will be able to improve your overall quality of your account, along with quality scores in a matter of a couple hours. If you have any questions or comments please leave them below and I would love to answer any questions that you may have.
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