Good keyword research forms only part of the most effective AdWords strategies. The other part is good content. You may think this is a given, that you’d only be advertising via AdWords if you already had good quality content in place but you’d be amazed at how many associates I’ve worked with and helped that simply did not use effective landing page copy. I’ve written a few tips in here about how to increase your quality score through better quality content.
Quality scores and quality content go hand in hand. To give you an example, here’s the ins and outs of one of my own AdWords campaigns and landing page combinations which went from an OK quality score of 7/10 to a great quality score of 10/10 simply by writing better, well researched content specifically related to the keyword, ad group and ad text I was using.
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Update 1st June 2009:
All you need to reach the magical numer is:
So, absolutely yes, it is possible! You can get the holy grail of quality scores by following google’s guidelines but if you’ve tried that (and like me most of you will have!) and it hasn’t worked, you might want to try some software that will do it for you or you may want to keep trying yourself until you hit that golden 10. Either way, here’s what I did to get a quality score of 10/10 for one of my campaigns:
- Increase CTR to 20%+ (If you need help with this, see James Schramko’s Double Digit CTR page)
- Used an ‘Exact Matching’ keyword
- Keyword also present in source code title, meta keywords and meta description tags
- Tightly grouped Keywords in tightly knitted AdGroups (SpeedPPC will do this for you)
- Keywords in AdText but not exactly the same keywords as the actual keyword you are targeting
- Keyword did not appear in body text of landing page but it was present in a <h2> tag in the landing page footer
- Keep the landing page ‘on theme’
I looked at this in much more depth in my post about how to get an AdWords Quality score of 10/10.
Resources To Help You:
- AdWords Beater - How To Make Profitable, High, Double Digit CTR AdWords PPC Campaigns
- Speed PPC - How To Increase Your AdWords Profits By Spending Less Time Arranging AdGroups and More Time Earning
An interesting question and one which was posed to me by a friend of mine who had noticed an increase in quality score just by having the right keywords in his meta keywords tag. I have to say, that in my short time looking into Quality Score, that on two research projects where I managed to achieve a quality score of 10/10, the keywords were present.
One example was a car rental website with the exact matching keyword ‘car rental in san jose costa rica’ and one was for an exact match ‘how to fix the red ring of death‘ xbox 360 landing page. In the first example, the meta keywords were: “costa rica, car rental, san jose, cheap, discount, 4×4″ and additionally, which may have also contriubuted, the page meta description was: “Vamos Rent-a-Car is the most affordable car rentals company in San Jose Costa Rica offer discount car rental and car hire service with basic insurance and a cell phone included.”
It is interesting to note that in the san jose costa rica example, the keyword did not appear in the body text of the page at all…
Update 1st June 2009:
If you don’t have time to read this blog post, there’s a much nicer, condensed set of AdWords Beating instructions in the AdWords Guide by Kyle and Carson - it’ll cost you, but it’ll pay you back in 2 days.
Introduction:
OK, I thought I’d post this just to show you an example of a website that is attaining a 10/10 quality score as at 1st December 2008. Surprisingly, it does not include all of the elements that you’d normally assume to be present for such a feat. The site and adwords keyword that I will be looking at are in the Car Rental industry, but more specifically, and here is some link love for the owner of the site for allowing me to analyse it, the Costa Rica Car Rentals industry and the site in question is leading Costa Rican Auto Rental firm, Vamos 4×4.
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There’s been a lot of flapping lately. If you can imagine the world of google in a hierarchical form, with google at the very top, then 4 or 5 Super Gurus on the tier below, then 10 times as many guru wannabes on the tier below and then another tier of guru wannabe wanabees below that and so on and so on until you get to the real tail end of the wannabe chart - round about where I am. Ok, so if one of the top Gurus starts shitting his pants because the future of google lies not in the hands of any of their SEO technical skills but on factors way beyond their control such as IP address, geographical region, search history and other third party derived information, the effect is that all of the wannabe wannabe wannabes on the lower tiers of SEODOM start shitting their pants too, like a bad game of Chinese Whispers 2.0.
Take this one, for instance…
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I’ve just done a search for one of my many sites and spotted a new googleism in the SERPS. The ability to ‘promote’ or ‘delete’ a result from the results pages! Admittedly, it is customised for my preferences, using my google ID as the epicentre, but is an interesting move towards user-generated content, pulling the philosophy of social media and widgetization right into search.
If your site was made by humans, for humans, then you’ll probably receive many promotes, but if you’ve got your rankings underhanded, chances are you’ll get a fair few ‘deletes’ against your site - that’s not to mention how competitors will react….
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I’ve just launched a new landing page for a product I’m promoting via PPC. I am an AdWords Qualified Individual, and I understand the relevancy of text and the concept of theme but this drop has made me stroke my stubbled chin in puzzlement.
Yesterday when I started the campaign, I had a Quality Score of Great 9/10 for both of my Ad Groups on 95% of their keywords. If you want to know how to improve on this, see my post on how to get an AdWords Quality Score of 10/10. Anyway, back to the point at hand, the campaign had been live for about 10 hours and was achieving a CTR of about 4.5% but my conversions on my landing page didn’t seem to match. As always, I felt the urge to try and tweak things a little but am now considering the possibility that the tweaks I made to my landing page have affected the Quality Score of the campaign adversely. So what did I change?
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- Finally, something that actually did help me to increase my CTR
We’ve all been there, in that place where the wall looks so inviting to bang your head against because your damn AdWords PPC Campaign has just screwed you over again…15,000 impressions and only 167 clicks, another great day of a 1.1% CTR - bang there goes my quality score which I’ve been working so bloody hard to sort out!
I use PPC to drive traffic to a number of CJ affiliate sites and my CTR was suffering hugely and because of that, my whole campaign was running at a loss. I had read all of the ‘how to optimize my adwords campaign’ posts on various internet marketing forums around the net and I got the philosophy. I understood themed adgroups, related keywords, relevant ad text but I couldn’t help but feel like there was something missing. Some dark secret that all the super-affiliates understand and I just missed.
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OK, so it’s the credit crunch here in the UK. I have an exploding credit card bill and I need to pay £460 by the 28th November 2008. The strength of the £ to the $ at the moment is weak, which is good news if I’m working in $s, and it means I need to make $690 in 11 days by any means possible to stop my card from going into arrears!
Now this is aside from all of my other projects, this is something that needs to come from online work in whatever form, fixing pages, sellings ads, selling links whatever I can do to make this money.
OK, so what are my skills? Well, I can code CSS/XHTML, WordPress Themes, Write copy pretty well, carry out minor server changes, flip websites, I’m a certified Google AdWords Professional…I have a number of online properties that have just been sitting there for a while. Maybe it’s time to try and monetize them?
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Yes, lately, one of my sites received the infamous ‘google slap’ that turns my healthy .20c CPC to a $5.00 per click campagin. In this series, I’m going to show you everything I try to return my CPC to my former levels.
