If you know anything about adwords management, you know that in order to boost your quality score you need to do things like use smaller ad groups, small batches of keywords, keyword heavy copy, etc. But what do you do when your landing page is the problem? Here are a few of your options…
Improving Your Landing Page For Effective AdWords Management
Quality score seems complicated but it’s actually very simple. It’s a rating based on relevance. How relevant are your keywords, ads, copy and landing page? Do they all tie together? Would a user who searched your keyword and clicked on your ad be happy with the page they landed on? These are all the factors that together make up a quality score. You can win this game by being simple, straightforward and honest about what you are trying to sell. In SEO this is fairly common knowledge but it gets lost in the PPC world due to the fact you are buying. Still, as a buyer you want to pay the best price possible for your clicks and a high quality score will help decrease the amount you pay per click.
If you’re using WordPress you can be guided through a lot of this by simply using the Yoast plugin and following their instructions to get your post a green light. However, even in using Yoast it’s good to understand why they are asking you to do the things you’re doing. The following is a great primer for that.
Make Your Landing Pages As Specific as Possible
The more specific you can make your landing pages the better. As an example say you are an online store that sells fishing and hunting equipment. Rather than bidding for fishing & hunting searches in the same ad group you would want to separate these into separate ad groups each with separate landing pages that contain keywords specific to the items you’re selling. That’s not to say you can’t run a campaign that has a combined fishing & hunting theme and be effective, you can. The likelihood of you paying more per click than you would had you separated them is high though. Google likes relevance and anything that aids in a positive user experience.
Keyword Repetition
For relevance your landing page should repeat keywords you are targeting. To return to the fishing / hunting example again. If I’m running a campaign for fishing gear I may have an ad group with keywords like “buy fishing poles,” “bait & tackle,” “fishing equipment,” etc. I would then create ads that match these searches “buy fishing poles 15% off” and run these ads to a landing page I created specifically for a sale on fishing poles that repeats my keywords in a natural and fluid way. So maybe there’s text on the page that says “we have the best prices on bait & tackle, fishing equipment and gear. Right now you can buy fishing poles 15% off!” – as you can see this text repeats several of the above mentioned keywords and will help with landing page relevance.
Header Tags
In keeping with our theme here, your header tags should also repeat your keywords. After the introductory text there will be a heading that reads “Buy Fishing Poles 15% Off” with all of your sale itmes underneath it. Then maybe a bit further down the page there’s another heading that reads “Bait & Tackle” – “Related Items” “More Fishing Gear” etc. For best practices you’re going to want to have only 1 H1 tag and then a variety of other header tags (H2, H3, etc.).
Alt-Tags for Images
Since a search engine doesn’t read an image it’s good to tag them with alt=”description”. This is a pretty basic and standard thing in the web design world but less likely to be considered in AdWords Management. To hammer it into your head – repeat your keywords in the alt tag wherever possible. Seeing a theme here? Good… that’s how you win the relevance game. Repeating your keywords everywhere you possibly can on your landing page.
Meta Data
What should you do in your meta tags? REPEAT YOUR KEYWORDS! See kids, it’s really simple. The process of optimizing your landing page for quality score breaks down to finding relevant keywords to bid on and then repeating those keywords anywhere you can in your ad copy and on your landing page. Meta data is no different. Try to narrow everything you’re selling down as much as possible so you can tag it with very specific meta data and repeat your keywords.
Page Load Time
Page load time is the one aspect of landing page optimization that does not involve repeating your keywords. Anything you can do to make the user experience better is going to help. Think of it like this – If you’re Google or Bing or Yahoo you’re a search engine who wants to keep users coming back. If you’re serving them pages that load slowly or time out the chances are good users are going to stop searching there. For this reason it only makes sense that you optimize your pages for load time.
All in all if you follow the mantras of “be specific” and “repeat your keywords” you can drastically improve your quality score and garner better click through rates and lower costs per click.
Best of luck!
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