Before we discuss the importance of your website’s quality score and how to improve it, lets go over what a quality score is. A quality score is an estimate of how relevant your online advertisement, landing page and keyword are to the person searching on Google. It is so important because it determines how far up on the organic search list your website will appear. Think about how many times you were searching for something and made it past the first page of results. Not many, right? Well, with a low Q score you can forget appearing on even the first fifteen pages let alone the first one. Another great thing about having a good Q score is you will pay less per click the higher it is, two incentives that are crucial for successful online advertising.
So the next question is how do we get a good Quality score? The Q score is determined by a combination of click through rates and relevancy to the searched term. Google will recognize when you have searched for a particular keyword and when your have not clicked on a leading result. In an effort to give you what you’re looking for, Google will lower their Q score so they don’t come up as often for your searches. They are basically assuming that if you never click on a link, it isn’t what you’re looking for. Most of the time they would be right. The more your link is clicked on after a keyword search, the higher your click through rate, the higher your Q score. Get it? Well that’s only half of it. But before we get into relevance, how do we make sure we have a high click through rate?
Split testing.
Split testing involves making two of the same ads with different content. Through Google analytics you will see which one has received more clicks. Delete the other. Then you will gradually make changes to the winning ad until you have a maximum click through rate. Trial and error will lead you to click through rate success.
The other half of your Q score is determined by relevance. Google can actually tell how relevant the content of your site is to the topic being searched. This eliminates anyone trying to take advantage of keyword searches. For example, a website with a certain keyword written five hundred times on a page would not receive a good Q score. Google is not stupid by any means. They want to eliminate any flaw in the searching system, giving the searcher exactly what they are looking for. That being said, keywords are also very important in raising your Q score (used sparingly). Because Google can detect duplicate content, Key words have to be place in different sections of the page. It’s always important to have your keywords in the ad text itself, but it is also important to put them in your Meta tags, your description, your H1 tags, your title and your content. This way Google will find relevance with your entire page thus raising your Q score.
Do yourself a favor and take this seriously. Google can be the difference between getting rich and going out of business. You don’t want to be on the wrong end of the infamous “Google Slap”.