Quick Wins For Improving Keyword Quality Score (QS)
Keyword Quality Score (QS) can make a huge difference to your conversion rate, cost and number of impressions. Google will give you a QS every time someone searches for your keywords. Google AdWords rates QS 0 – 10 where 0 – 4 is ‘Poor’; 5 – 7 is ‘OK’; and 8 – 10 is ‘Great’.
If you have a poor QS there are a few things you can do to quickly increase it.
You can work on your landing page (the page that your Ad links to) making sure that it includes your keywords in the title, meta tags, content and alt tags. Also make sure that your page doesn’t take too long to load which can have a negative impact on your QS.
A key element contributing to a good QS is the Click Through Rate (CTR) on the particular keyword. The CTR is the number of clicks per impression, i.e. the percentage of times a user clicks on your ad. If you get a large percentage of people clicking on your ad, Google assumes that your keywords must be highly relevant and will require a lower keyword bid price for the same position, and so save you money.
Another way of improving your QS is including the keywords in an Ad. I was achieving quality score 2 which was having a negative impact on the number of impressions that I was receiving and the cost per click. I reviewed the Ad and found that I didn’t have the particular keywords included in the Ad! I added the keyword into the headline and repeated it on the 3rd line of the ad. The Quality Score jumped up to 4 over the next 20 minutes! I increased my impressions by a whole 50% and my cost per click dropped down from £0.70 to £0.66 for the same position!
A note of caution, if you are making any similar changes keep an eye on the keyword position as it can improve very quickly and you might end up right at the top of the page which can cost you a lot more money especially if the keyword is expensive.
Submitted by Olga
