5 easy steps to Improve your quality score | SEM tips & tricks

5 Easy steps to improve Quality Score 

Quality Score! A dream of every PPC/SEM Specialist & those who are struggling to improve their Ad Rank while maintaining Budget Constraints. We all are very curious about Quality Score, and everyone wants the highest number on the scale of 1-10, but why? The answer is, keywords with high-quality scores helps to improve AdWords overall Account Health Score and lowers CPC(Cost per click) & Cost per Conversion with better Ad Positions. Let's check out these 5 Steps on how to improve Quality Score:

Also, Check this article for detailed Step-by-Step Process for Improving Keyword Quality Score on the basis of Google's 3 Parameters(Expected CTR, Ad Relevancy, Landing Page Experience).

1. Invest at least 15% of your PPC budget toward branded keywords

It is possible that even 0% CTR keywords can have perfect Quality Scores of 10 in an account and it can happen only when you have high account average CTR, which may pull up the Quality Scores for all the keywords in the account. Hence, it is wise to spend more for your branded keywords, which can surprisingly increase your CTR and also helps other keywords to achieve more.

2. Extensive use of Long-Tail Keywords

In online business, we need to be very specific about what we are offering specially when Customer Behavior is changing everyday. Now a days, when visitors don't hesitate to search anything starting from "how to...." and ends with a story, we can grab the opportunity to be specific and differentiate our offerings from competitors by providing Long-Tail keywords into Adwords as they are:

• very specific
• less competitive
• contains modicum of intent
• very convertible-huge chance of converting your visitors into customers as they are very specific and targets your loyal audience only those who are willing to convert.
• cost less on a CPC basis
• more combination options to reduce competition(e.g: red leather jacket, leather jacket red, red jacket leather)

3. Regularly optimize and increase the number of your Ad Text

After choosing right keywords, it is necessary to optimize your Ad Text in a regular basis and increase their number by writing 5-10 Ad Text's every month.

Optimize your Ad Text regularly by using best methods such as A/B testing, dynamic keyword insertion and more importantly ad writing techniques, which clearly differentiate your offering from competitors.

Do not hesitate on adding more ads, it states your continuous activity in the account and displaying more ads will attract more visitors and most important it will show your presence in the relevant field which will encourage your visitors trust and their loyalty. 

Bonus: Adding more ads will fulfill one of the PPC best practices, which really works in order to increase your Quality Score.

If you see a thumbs up for your ''Multiple Text Ads Running" like above then you are going good.

Note: Create more Ad Groups to contain your Text Ads, do not wait for fill one up and then create another one. In some cases, it has been seen that people are using 1 Ad Group for 1 Text Ads, that means, 50 Ad Groups for 50 Text Ads, well, it is not the recommended step, it depends on how your Advertising Channel is programmed with how much priority. Those businesses who only concentrate on Text Ads, and nothing else- they may structure their ads like this.

4. Account Activity

High quality score can only be achieved by doing a lot of dedicated Account Activity. Writing new Text Ads, adding new keywords, creating new Ad Groups are some examples which we need to do in a regular basis not like one time activity. Most of the business accounts fails for this reason, as they don't participate enough in their account activities.

What we should do in a 30 days of time span:

• Create 5-10 Text Ads
• Adding more keywords as much as possible
• Creating 2-4 Ad Groups
• Create at-least 1 Campaign

5. Follow 8 best PPC practices

"To achieve something you need to do more than something". Since, getting a highest Quality Score may be a nightmare, but following 8 best PPC practices may turn your nightmare into a real world achievement. However, most of us ignore these factors even they are very easy to include.

Following are the best practices that PPC experts follow to create and run effective, profitable campaigns, make sure that you are following all these important guidelines:

1. Network Targeting: Are your campaign settings customized for their specific network(Search vs. Display)?

2. Geo Targeting: Are your campaigns focused on your most profitable markets?

3. Language Targeting: Are you making use of language restrictions for better audience targeting?

4. Conversion Tracking: Are you keeping track of which keywords and ads drive profitable actions?

5. Multiple Text Ads Running(already mentioned in 3rd step): Are you running multiple ads in each ad group to ensure strong targeting?

6. Modified Broad Match Type: Are you making use of match types that give you more control?

7. Negative Keywords: Are you using negative keywords to reduce wasteful spending and irrelevant clicks?

8. Use of Adwords Ad Extension: Are you using Ad Extensions to provide additional links and improve click-through rates?

These eight best practices are those factors, which we should not ignore in any case. They looks like a simple check boxes but they means a lot from Google Adwords point of view. Most of businesses don't even have their Conversion Tracking turned on, they don't even use Negative Keywords much which is very important for cost reduction.

We should also be very curious about optimizing our landing pages as they can affect Quality Score as well.

If your Quality Scores are not well, follow the 5 above mentioned key-points to improve it and beat your competitors, which will also lower your CPC.