Koozai > Blog > Ways to Improve Quality Score

Ways to Improve Quality Score

| 2 minutes to read

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

There are three main areas that Google AdWords review to calculate your keyword Quality Score and I am going to explain ways that you can improve each one.

Keyword Relevance
Google looks at a keyword and compares it to the associated ad text to see how closely they match each other. Some points to review are:

  • Is the keyword in the headline of the ad?
  • Is the keyword in the body or display URL?
  • Are your keywords grouped in targeted ad groups?
  • Are you bidding on the three match types?
  • Is your CTR higher than 1.00%?

If you can answer yes to all of these questions, you should have no problems with keyword relevance.

Landing Page Quality
Google like their visitors to be sent to relevant sites when they click on one of their paid adverts. If you are bidding on the term ‘puppies’ and your ad links to a doctors surgery website, then your landing page quality would be deemed as poor.

If you can answer yes to the following questions, your landing page quality should have no problems:

  • Is your landing page relevant to each keyword within the ad group?
  • Are you displaying any promises/messages displayed in your ad copy clearly on the page?
  • Are the keyword(s) in the ad group mentioned throughout the page content?
  • Does your page Meta match your keywords?
  • Does your landing page link to other relevant pages within the site?
  • Does your landing page have a link to your Privacy Policy?
  • Do you have a low bounce rate?
  • Do your customers stay on the site for a period of time after they arrive?

For more information on how you can evaluate your adverts’ landing pages see What Tests Should I Try On My Landing Pages?

Landing Page Load Time
There is nothing more frustrating than clicking on an advert and having to wait an age for the page to load. Google have now taken this into consideration and will deduct points from your Quality Score for slow loading landing pages.

Here are a few points to consider that should help you to understand why you are scoring a poor landing page load time score.

  • Is the page loading fast enough? Do manual checks!
  • Are you using multi-second Meta refreshes?
  • Are you using re-directs?
  • Are you using multiple re-directs?
  • Are you using an interstitial page before your actual landing page?
  • Is your site hosted on a slow server?
  • How large is your page’s html document?

So there we have it, a few pointers on ways to improve your Quality Score!

If you would like help from Koozai to improve your Quality Score, please get in contact about our Pay Per Click ServicesService.

Responses

  1. Paddy Moogan avatar
    Paddy Moogan

    Hi Sam,

    Thanks for the reply that helps explain things a lot more.

    Definitely agree that conversions are the bottom line, I can live with a poor quality score if a keyword is converting well!

    Thanks again,

    Paddy

  2. Sam Noble avatar

    Hi Paddy,

    Thanks for your comment.

    Basically, the idea behind using all three match types is you run with them for a few weeks and review which has generated the highest Quality Score. You can then choose to either continue to run with all three or delete the match type with the lowest score.

    Until you run all three match types, you will be unable to find the best performer and broad match keywords can generate a higher score. I wouldn’t recommend starting off on bidding on broad match but once your campaign has been running a while and you have backfilled with negatives, this is definitely a test to try.

    Improving your Quality Score should come second in line, with conversions coming first. If you are generating conversions with a good Cost per Conversion but your Quality Score is low, I wouldn’t remove the keyword if you can’t improve the Quality Score.

    Hope this helps

    Sam

  3. Paddy Moogan avatar
    Paddy Moogan

    Hi Sam,

    Thanks for the blog post. One of your questions interested me most –

    “Are you bidding on the three match types?”

    Have you found this to have a good impact on quality score? I often bid on exact and phrase match to test which one performs better and what keyword variations there are, but I’d never really thought about using this as a way of improving quality score before.

    Cheers.

    Paddy

  4. […] Ways to Improve Quality Score, stay tuned for my next […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Digital Ideas Monthly

Sign up now and get our free monthly email. It’s filled with our favourite pieces of the news from the industry, SEO, PPC, Social Media and more. And, don’t forget – it’s free, so why haven’t you signed up already?