10 Critical Steps To Improve Your Quality Score And
To Pay Less For Your Google AdWords Campaigns

Getting a good Google quality score is important to lower the minimum bid price for your keywords on your Google AdWords campaigns. The quality score ranges from 1 to 10, where 10 is best. I think it's not absolutely necessary to get a quality score of 9 or 10 for all of your keywords, but you should aim to get a quality score of at least 7 or 8 for most of your keywords.

How does Google actually calculate the quality score for your keywords? Well there are many different factors that determine your quality score and only Google knows the exact rules.

Nevertheless, the following tips and guidelines should allow you a get a sufficiently high quality score – somewhere around 8 or even 9 – for most of your keywords:

* Put a privacy policy on your website

* Add some valuable content to your site – 5 to 10 short articles containing 300 – 500 words should be enough.

* Create some backlinks to your site: For example, submit your articles (or at least a few of them) to various article directories.

* Add a "Contact Me" page to your site.

* Add an "About" page to your site.

* Add a "Resources" page to your site with links to valuable and relevant sites. Consider sites with a high Google Page Rank as well as .edu and .org sites.

* Add a sitemap to your site.

* Make sure your site is clean, has a professional look and feel and doesn't contain any "under construction"- or similar pages.

* Make sure your ads are relevant. A good practice is to use the keyword you are bidding on in the headline of your ad.

* Make sure your landing page is relevant. Don't try to sell guitar lessons on your landing page when your ad is talking about an easy way to learn piano. You could even create a dedicated landing page for each of your adgroups – although that's not always necessary.


Ok, all this sounds like quite a lot of work, but on the other hand it's not really that much either. Look, the majority of these pages won't contain much content, some of these pages could be generated automatically (for example the sitemap), the "Resources" page is just a list of a few links… Also, some of these pages can be easily reused (with a few minor modifications) for other websites and other AdWords campaigns.

And following the steps outlined above will not only assure you lower minimum bid prices for your keywords, but they will also drastically increase your sales conversion. Why and how? Let's have a quick look at the entire process:

* Someone searches for a solution to a specific problem on Google

* This person finds your ad on the Google search results page and because you used the keyword he was searching for in the headline of your ad, he clicks on it.

* He is arrives at your landing page, which delivers what was promised in the ad and contains even more mouth-watering information.

* Your site is neat, clean and looks professional. There is a privacy policy, a contact form, a sitemap…

* Now you just made a big step towards gaining the trust of your site visitor and you drastically increased your chances that he will sign up for your newsletter, buy your product…


So as you can see, the Google quality score isn't something that was introduced by Google to bother you or to make your life more difficult than it needs to be. It's just a means to improve quality and you can even look at it as an indicator telling you if your campaign and website is sufficiently sophisticated to become profitable and to generate a positive ROI.

So, please do yourself a favor, invest a few hours of your time, follow the suggestions mentioned above and I promise you won't regret it.