Whenever we are reading through the dozens upon dozens of blogs that we subscribe to, we are always on the the lookout for anything pertaining to the Google AdWords Quality Score. Anyone who reads PPC Hero can attest to the fact that we love to discuss the AdWords Quality Score. So, whenever we see a post about this topic our interest is automatically piqued!

On Tuesday, we discovered a post on Search Engine Watch entitled, “Google AdWords Quality Score — That’s Old-School for SEO” by Mark Jackson. Naturally, this article caught our collective eye. The article discusses a new Google AdWords Quality Score algorithm that concerns the landing page Quality Score. The sentence that really caught our attention was this:

“Google is asking that you have a targeted page for every keyword that you would like to advertise against. They’re saying that if the keywords aren’t in the title tag, content, and if the page isn’t specific to the keywords that you would like to advertise against, there’s a good chance that the page won’t show up in the top Google AdWords listings, even if you’re willing to pay or bid the highest amount for a listing there.”

We keep pretty close tabs on Google AdWords Quality Score updates and we had not heard of this new initiative by Google. We thought that if this is truly a new Quality Score algorithm, then we have a lot of work to do with our clients! So, I thought I would do some investigative work to uncover the details of this new landing page initiative. I went straight to the source: our Google AdWords Representative, and our Google AdWords Quality Score Representative.

According to my Google Representatives there has been no recent updates to the landing page Quality Score ranking system. Basically, there are still three elements of your landing page that determine your landing page Quality Score:

Keyword Relevancy: Google scans your URL to make sure that your landing page is relevant to the search query and ad text. The post from SEW takes keyword relevancy to the extreme by dedicating every single keyword in its own unique landing page. Keep in mind that you need to have your account structured so that your keywords are tightly themed. These keywords should send users to a highly relevant landing page. But you don’t need to create thousands of dynamically generated landing pages to achieve relevancy.

Landing Page Load Time: Google wants to make sure that they provide the best user experience possible. If a user clicks on an ad and the landing page takes an excessive time to load, then that is a poor experience. Basically, make sure that your landing pages are clean and clutter free so that they load as quickly as possible.

Content Relevancy/User Experience: This is the element of the landing page Quality Score that is murky, even to us! Google also takes into account if your landing page provided the information/product/service that the user was searching for. I tried to drill down to find exactly how Google gauges this somewhat subjective aspect of a landing page but my Google Representatives said there are “triggers that indicate relevancy” but they wouldn’t go any further. My insight? I think they mean optimize your landing page toward conversion generation.

If you are still unclear as to if your landing page has any issues, you can just check your AdWords account! Within the AdWords keyword analysis tool, you can find this information:

We agree with the SEW article that relevancy is the key to success. However, the Google AdWords Landing Page Quality Score has not undergone a major overhaul that requires advertisers to create individual landing pages for every single keyword.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Google AdWords, Google AdWords Quality Score. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.