Pay per click (PPC) marketing can prove to be an effective tool for driving traffic to your site and testing variables to optimize your traffic conversion. However, succeeding at PPC marketing takes more than just placing a bid per click that will get you in the top position. It’s also important that your website’s “quality score” is up to par. Without a great quality score, you can end up paying a lot more per click just to get your ad showing. This article will give you some details on how to optimize your website for PPC marketing so that you get a favorable quality score and win the higher positions.
Quality Scores and Why They’re So Important
Your website’s quality score is the standard by which a search engine determines the value of your web page. Quality score is measured according to many of the same variables which are used to determine your site’s SEO: keyword relevance, keyword density, meta information, page performance, page load time, number of quality backlinks, etc.
When you have a low-quality score, your ad is less likely to appear in a higher position in the PPC search results, making it less visible for web users and thus decreasing the amount of traffic to your site. Pages with low-quality scores (1-4 range) will also require a much higher price per click just to be visible, and this can cost you a lot of money.
However, a high-quality score (8-10) can actually win you a position ABOVE the ads you’re competing with, even if the people running those ads are paying more per click than you are. So how can you prepare your website to get a favorable quality score?
How the Quality Score is Determined
At this time, the Google PPC quality score is measured according to the following variables:
- Click-through rate: how often your PPC ad gets clicked in comparison to how often it’s shown.
- Quality of your landing page: SEO variables (off-page and on), page performance, and transparency (more on this in a second).
- Quality of your overall website: SEO variables (off-page and on, for your entire website and company transparency.
If you have a good click-thru rate (at least 1%, preferably 2% or more) and if your landing page and website are well optimized, you can achieve a good quality score, save money on clicks and get higher positions in the PPC search results. For gaining a good click-thru rate, you’ll need to make sure that you build a good PPC campaign and a good PPC ad, which you can find information on in our articles on PPC campaign building.
However, since the topic of this article is landing page and site optimization, let’s look at the variables which will help you to gain a good quality score for your site…
Quality Score Variable #1: Landing Page Relevancy
When it comes to the relevance of your landing page, you need to make sure that your page is well optimized for the main keywords in your PPC ad group. For example, say you have the following ad group: “dog training,” “dog obedience training,” “dog aggression training,” and “basic dog training.” These are the keywords that you want to optimize your landing page for by including them in your meta information and headlines, your site copy, and image alt tags.
Quality Score Variable #2: Page Load Time
The quality of your page load time is one of the variables which Google directly displays in your PPC account, which means that load time is very important for your quality score. For example, if you have a low-quality score, Google will actually display a rating for your page load time saying either “no problems” or “poor.” Since a lower page load time is desirable for web users and also considered good for SEO, it’s important that you use GZIP or another type of file compression to get your page load time as low as possible.
Quality Score Variable #3: Transparency
Google needs to know that they can be confident in sending web users to your site, and one thing which gives them this confidence is transparency. In other words, if you display your privacy policy, contact information, and information about your company (or links leading to this information), you’re demonstrating transparency. For best results, put your company information somewhere that it will be easy for visitors to find it if they need to.
Quality Score Variable #4: Off-Page SEO
Google is big on backlinks (aka off-page SEO) when it comes to measuring your site’s SEO, so it’s safe to assume that this also has an impact on your quality score. In fact, Google encourages website owners to build backlinks in order to improve their chances of getting a good quality score. Make sure that your backlinks are connecting you with relevant and high-quality sites and be diligent in increasing the number of backlinks to your landing page.
Quality Score Variable #5: Overall Site Quality
When measuring the quality and relevance of your landing page, Google also compares it to the quality of your overall site. This means that you need a good overall website theme (keywords, content, meta information, etc.) that supports the keywords within your PPC campaign. It’s also important that you have additional pages (15 to 20) of quality content which your users can access from your landing page.
Conclusion
Considering the importance of your quality score, it’s a good idea to be diligent in your on-page and off-page SEO even after you’ve launched your PPC campaign. For best results, build your site upon the foundation of good keyword research and build out a good site structure with 15 to 20 pages of relevant content before you begin your first PPC ad campaign. Good luck.
