eNicholas

adwords quality score

Obtaining a high quality score for your AdWords campaigns is important, very important actually because it will determine how much you pay per click and sometimes if your ad will show at all.

If you have a commercial website, perhaps promoting your own products or service then chances are your site pages will be full with rich, relevant content.

But what if you are setting up a new website and adwords campaign from scratch? I tend to do this on a weekly and sometimes daily basis, so I’d like to share some of the expensive lessons I’ve learned along the way that will:

• allow you to create websites that receive a high adwords quality score
• avoid being google slapped and forced to increase your cost-per-click
• minimise the bid amount per keyword
• increase your ad position without paying more money

So before we even get into the AdWords system to setup a campaign, you need to make a website that fits in with what google wants.

You may have heard that it’s not easy, you may have paid Google experts for an adwords course, you may have even spent hours pouring over adwords related websites you find in the search results… no matter what your history is with AdWords so far, I’m guessing that the common perception out there is that everything to do with the AdWords Quality Score is quite difficult and specialised.

I’ve been through that steep learning curve, so I know how it feels. There have been times where I was so frustrated with underperforming AdWords campaigns that I just wanted to pack it in altogether. But I stuck with it, I forced myself read for weeks and weeks, I split tested A BUNCH of variations… then one day it all became easy and second nature. My goal today is to get you through that steep AdWords learning curve so that you can focus on a few core things to get your quality score high each and every time.

So the first step, as I mentioned before going off on a tangent about learning curves, is setting up a website that Google agree’s with.

You can read what Google wants on their official answers page (adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?answer=10215) but they give short, vague statements which are by no means a how-to guide on improving quality score! They do give you some important cues though, so focus your attention and energies on: quality + relevance

QUALITY: You need to create quality content, which basically means it should be of intrinsic value to the reader.

Sure it’s nice to have some keyword density and LSI optimisation in there, but don’t ever lose sight of the fact that we create websites for people and not for search engines. Too many people in SEO have that the wrong way around and do everything for the spiders.

So with quality, create pages that are 350 – 500 words long which mention the main keywords while giving the reader a genuine reason to stay on the site and continue reading (or taking an action).

RELEVANCE: Your website and content need to be relevant to the AdWords campaign and the keywords you are targetting!

If you plan to create an ad campaign around duck hunting, then make sure your website is about duck hunting locations, duck hunting tips, duck hunting seasons, duck hunting weapons, duck recipes, etc. This point I’m making here is two fold… you need to be relevant, because Google with score your relevance. You also need to be relevant, so that when someone clicks on your ad they will find something of interest and value once they arrive at your website.

I witness all too often, people putting their focus on getting people (traffic) to their website but give almost no attention to keeping them there. You don’t want to churn and burn traffic, you want to attract it… then keep it there…. then encourage them to come back…. and even get their friends to visit.

Get as specific as you can, so if your topic breaks down into 5 sub-topics create a page for each of those rather than lumping everything into one huge page.

Over from those points, you also need to incorporate another factor.

THE TRUST FACTOR: All good websites that care about their customers have a few things in common… a contact page, an about us page, a privacy policy page, perhaps a return policy page also.

Generally speaking, websites that are not to be trusted would never have any of those pages. So don’t be placed by default into that pile of bad apples, spend a little time setting up these extra pages so that Google and your visitors will view you as a trust worthy website that has nothing to hide.

So that is phase 1 of ensuring you obtain a high AdWords quality score. Next I will talk about click through ratios (CTR), keywords, ad groups, preselling methods and a few other must-have elements you’ll need in your AdWords campaign.

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