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Understanding Google AdWords Quality Score - Keywords Key words Keyword!
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AdWords Quality Score (QS) has a tremendous impact on your Google AdWords advertising. Whether your ad appears at all, and the price you pay, is a function not only of your bid and advertiser competition for a particular keywords but also your Google AdWords Quality Score. QS is rather mysterious, however, so let's investigate!
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By Jason McDonald
Senior SEO Instructor - JM Internet Group.
Posted: May 21, 2010
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Contents:
Adwords: How Google AdWords (Really) Works
As you probably know, AdWords is a pay-per-click advertising system. You advertise for a given keyword or keyphrase, and you pay if and only if someone clicks on your ad. Years ago, Overture created the idea of an auction in which advertiser bid to be listed for keywords. That was a simple auction: the vendor who bid the most, was displayed the most. The problem, however, was that a vendor with a poor ad could be shown again and again, generating few clicks and being 'not relevant' for user queries.
The genius of the Google AdWords system is Quality Score. Quality Score simply is a measurement of 'how relevant' your ad is to the search query. If someone enters 'San Jose SEO Consultant,' for example, and you see ads for consultants in Santa Monica, San Diego, San Francisco as well as San Jose then the San Jose ad is 'more relevant' to your search query and theoretically will pay a lower price per click than the less relevant ads.
Google clearly explains in its AdWords help that having a BETTER Quality Score will result in a lower cost per click. So it behooves you to do everything you can to increase your Quality Score, which for all intents and purposes means to improve the relevancy of your ad to the search keywords entered by the user into Google.
But how is this done? Google offers a little (vague) help, but through a little research and hard thinking, we can tease out the best way to improve your AdWords Quality Score. SEO helps a lot; I think of Quality Score quite simply as 'SEO for AdWords,' which is the theme of my online AdWords training, by the way...
Quality Score: The Google Explanation
Google has an official explanation of Quality Score. The first point is that your ads on Google do not affect your ads on the content network, nor vice versa.
Here are the core components, according to Google -
- The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google; note that CTR on the Google Network only ever impacts Quality Score on the Google Network -- not on Google
- Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
- The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
- The quality of your landing page
- The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
- The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
- Your account's performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
- Other relevance factors
What does this mean in practical terms? First and foremost: keywords, keywords, keywords! Google clearly wants you to place your keywords inside your ad text and on the landing pages themselves; the tighter the correlation the better. Consider, for example, a pet boarding hotel in San Francisco. It should include the keywords -
- pet boarding
- animal boarding
- cat boarding
- dog boarding
in its ads and landing pages. The implication is rather than one generic ad group, ad, and landing page, please create one group for 'pet,' one group for 'animal,' one group for 'cat, and one group for 'dog.' This is so when a user searches for 'dog boarding San Francisco,' she sees the 'dog' collateral; when she searches for 'pet boarding San Francisco,' she sees the 'pet' collateral and so forth.
In the short run, following SEO principles like this in your AdWords ads will improve your click thru rate. In the long run, Google implies that a better click thru rate will improve your quality score. You get a 'volume discount' from Google, in other words, by generating more clicks per impressions!
Best Practices to Improve your AdWords Quality Score
What are the 'best practices' for AdWords, given the Google explanation. First, weave your keywords inside your ads. Second, create as tight a fit as possible. Take generic words like 'pet' and break them down into more focused words 'dog,' 'cat,' 'bird,' etc. Create an a unique ad for each type - Google bolds the keywords in the ad displayed, which also presumably helps with clicks (and thereby the Quality Score). Third, organize your ad groups around a single keyword family. Don't mix and match ads and keywords groups. Fourth, apply SEO best practices to your landing pages. Using the pet example, have a 'dog' landing page, a 'cat' landing page, and a 'bird' landing page. Put the keywords strategically into the TITLE, H1 tags, etc., and make sure that there is strong keyword density on the landing page.
By strategically weaving your keywords into your ads at every step of the way, you have your best shot at improving your Quality Score. And a better Quality Score means better ad placement, more clicks, and cheaper clicks - making you (and Google) happy!
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