5 Tips To Improve Keyword Quality Scores

 

Anyone who’s managed AdWords campaigns knows that improving Quality Score can be a challenge. There’re many factors that go into its calculation and they can each take a while to improve.

 

If you have scores as low as 1/10 or 2/10 and are looking to increase them to 10/10, you’ll have to make some major changes to Ads, keywords and search terms.

 

Your keywords will have no quality scores when you first launch your AdWords campaign. And you’ll see this when you hover your mouse over the speech bubble next to your keywords. This will be updated as your campaign starts to run and your keywords are getting significant traffic volumes.

 

 

There’re 4 main factors to your quality scores (QS). These are landing page experience, expected CTR, Ad Relevance and Ad Extensions and improving each of these will bring your scores to the 10/10 mark.

 

The primary factors to QS are landing page experience, expected CTR and Ad relevance. And they’ll each have a status of Below Average, Average or Above Average to signify how optimised they are.

 

Here are 5 tips to improve quality scores for your keywords:

 

Improve Landing Pages
Landing pages are where people end up when they’ve clicked your ads. They should be relevant to the search terms they’ve used and the keywords in the ad groups and they should have the offer you’ve promised in the Ad.

 

So, landing page experience is an important Quality Score factor. You want to make sure that the bounce rates are low and that people are engaged when they’re on your website.

 

To reduce bounce rates, you should get visitors to see other related pages. So, if you want people to contact you, make sure you add a contact form which sends them to a “Thank You Page” when they’ve clicked the ‘Submit’ button.

 

 

Doing this will reduce bounce rates. And you can keep visitors more engaged by providing another related offer on the thank you page that moves them further down the buying funnel.

 

It also helps to set expectations. You can state on the landing page how long they can expect to hear back from you and how you’ll be contacting them.

 

On the other hand, if you’ve got a contact form, and all people see when they click the Submit button is an in-line message that says something like “thanks for your message” you’ll need to change this and add a thank you page.

 

 

Increase Click Through Rate
The Click Through Rate formula is displayed as a percentage and is calculated by dividing clicks by impressions

 

 

It’s a measure of how targeted your Ads are. If ads are targeted at the right audiences then you’ll see good CTRs. That will depend on your industry of course and it will vary for different keyword types.

 

However, 5% is usually a good CTR. That means for every one hundred people that see your Ads, 5 Click Through to your website. And other factors will come into play too like competitors and their offers and where you’re ranking in the Ad auction results.

 

However, the Quality Score is decided by Expected CTR and it’s forecasts what the CTR will be based on past performance, device used, Search terms used, location of searcher and others.

 

There’re a number of ways to improve Click Through Rate including:

 

⁃ ensuring that the keyword is included in the Ad – and the headline in particular
⁃ Using the dynamic Keyword Insertion syntax to include the keyword in the Ad automatically
⁃ Removing Ads, keywords and search terms with low CTRs
⁃ Removing broad match type keywords
⁃ Removing one word keywords that are underperforming

 

Make Ads Relevant
Making Ads relevant is the most important factor to improve quality score. When people search and see that the Ad is what they’ve been looking for, they’ll click through to learn more.

 

Google is serious about Ad relevance. And over the years they’ve updated the algorithms to reward Ads that are relevant to searches. And Quality Score is one of the most important metrics that they’ve implemented to show how relevant ads are to keywords.

 

Ad relevance is about ensuring the following:

 

⁃ the keyword used is included in the Ad text
⁃ The product or service searched for is mentioned in the Ad
⁃ All relevant Ad Extensions have been added
⁃ Character space is all used

 

Add Ad Extensions
Ad Extensions give your Ad more prominence in the search results. Your Ad gets more space when you include all sitelinks, callouts, call, price, structured snippet and location extensions that are applicable.

 

And people are more likely to click through when your Ad is at the top. And this increases your CTR and Quality Score.

 

 

Target the right Search Terms 
Targeting the right search terms helps to boost your keyword quality scores. If search terms aren’t related to your Ads and the products or services you’re promoting, then quality scores will be low.

 

There’s a difference between a keyword and a search term. A keyword is what you add in your campaign to target people who are looking for your products or services. A search term on the other hand is what people use to find your products or services. The match types are what match your Ads to the users Search term.

 

Keyword match types control the search terms which will trigger your Ads. The four match types you can use are broad, modified broad, phrase and exact match.

 

Each ad group can have one or more keyword match types. When you first launch your PPC campaigns, it’s usually best not to add broad match keywords because they target a broad range of searches and some may not be relevant.

 

That’s mainly because building a comprehensive list of negative keywords takes a while and you need them to block all irrelevant searches.

 

It’s best to start with phrase, exact or modified broad match keywords. They allow you to control the types of searches you get while you build your negative list.

 

When you’ve built a good list of negative keywords, you can now look to increase your reach by targeting many long tail keywords with broad match type keywords.

 

Conclusion
To improve quality score and reach scores as high as 10/10, you should ensure all ads are relevant to the searcher, that Ad Extensions have been added and landing page experience is great. This will help boost other metrics such as conversions and conversion rate.