The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

Improving Quality Score means improving relevance: if your offering directly address  a searcher’s need, that will most likely be reflected in a high Quality Score. Just as this applies to writing effective ad copy, it applies to building effective landing pages. The primary component of Google’s Quality Score calculation for landing pages is the Click-Through Rate (CTR): if a user clicks on your ad, looks through your landing page and clicks through to something else in your site, chances are they found something relevant. Google will increase your Quality Score accordingly. Just another way of saying that the best thing that you can do is build compelling, relevant landing pages.

Of course, there are a few tips and insights, many of them included in Google’s guidelines for improving landing pages, that can help you along, and that you may not have considered. I will break down some of those factors here.

Use Existing Pages Whenever Possible
Some people think that creating a landing page from scratch will automatically result in a better quality score than using an existing page on your site.  This isn't always the case.  Pages that already focus on the product you are advertising, and that you have spent time optimizing, can often be further improved to serve both as a landing page and a content piece on your site.  If it is already indexed by Google, you are probably better off optimizing a single page instead of creating a whole new one to test and optimize.  Work smart, not hard.

When optimizing your landing pages, remember that Google reads a Web site the way a good journalist writes a newspaper column, in an inverted pyramid.  That means the most important information should be at the top of the page: your title tag, meta description, and the first paragraph of content are highly prioritized by Google.  

Use keyword rich, readable title tags
The title tag is the most valuable line on your page: it’s what Google displays in the first line of the organic search results. It should be concise — 70-75 characters long — match the keywords you are bidding on, and be human-readable.  If you are selling planes, for instance, your title tag should read something like "Planes for Sale," not "the best aeronautical solutions for your company or business".

Write useful and unique meta descriptions
Your meta description should follow the same guidelines as your title tag (though it can be up to 150 characters long). It should reinforce it, but not duplicate it. (Duplicate title tags and meta descriptions are frowned upon by Google.  You can sign up for Webmaster Tools and there will be a report on how many duplicate descriptions you have on your site.) The Meta description is displayed in the second and third lines of Google's organic results.  See the top result for "Planes for Sale" below:

Don't use images for text
While Google is working toward Universal Search, they still don’t understand images or videos. Keep that in mind when optimizing your landing page.  If you have a beautiful, shiny graphical banner at the top of your page advertising  “Airplanes For Sale!”, Google doesn't know about it, and it isn’t part of their consideration when they calculate your Quality Score. If it isn't text on the page, Google doesn't know it is there. There are tricks you can use with CSS to overlay images on text, but if you aren't familiar with them, I recommend using text whenever possible.

Put Readable Information Into Your URL
If you can edit the URL of your landing page to include keywords, do it.  Google places a lot of emphasis on URL's. If they are readable (/buying-planes, instead of /page133.html,) it can help improve your quality score.  

Reduce your page’s load time
People don't wait for pages to load, and Google penalizes you for slow loading pages.  Look out for more on this recommendation in the coming weeks.  

If you have a poor quality score, these recommendations can dramatically turn it around.  Try them all, or try a combination of them.  You can lower your cost-per-click, and improve your conversion rates.  It's a win/win situation.

Trace, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.