10 easy ways to improve your Google Adwords quality score

Have you notice your minimum bid price on adwords rocket from 10p to £5, or even higher? If you have you have been effected by Google’s latest innovation to “improve” the ads we see in the sponsored links section of its search returns.

Until recently your position on adwords was dictated by the amount you bid multiplied by the click through rate of the specific advert. Then in mid 2006 they added a third metric, the quality score. According to Google the quality score judges the relevance of your ad text, keyword and landing page. A poor quality score will result in a higher bid price, a lower position or even your ad disappearing completely.

Currently, the formula is best represented as:
Quality Score = keyword’s CTR, ad text relevance, keyword relevance, landing page relevance

How do I know what my Quality Score is?
According to Google “the best way to determine your Quality Score is to look at each keyword’s minimum bid. The lower the minimum bid, the higher your keyword’s Quality Score.” Google also recently added a quality score display in adwords.

How do I improve my quality score?
For obviously reasons Google haven’t releases the specific factors they use to determine your quality score, but they have given broad guidelines. However, through a process of trial and error I (and others) have been able to determent how to improve your quality score, below are ten easy tips that should result in an instant improvement:

1. Allow robots to spider the site – if google can’t analyse your site they assume you are trying to hide something.

2. Ensure you have a clearly defined privacy policy - (Robot Friendly & Easily Accessible) – google assume that dodgy sites won’t have a privacy policy.

3. Ensure you have a contact us page with full address, telephone number & email - (Robot Friendly & Easily Accessible) - google assume that dodgy sites wont publish their contact details.

4. Avoid using too many standard sized banners & creatives – google assume that you must be an affiliate if your page is covered in banners.

5. Mask any code that could be attributed to an affiliate network or PPC Search Engine – use a simple java script redirect for affiliate links

6. Increase Content to Banner (Image) Ratio – minimum 60% content to 40% images.

7. Add outgoing links to authority sites – add maybe 3-6 links to good quality sites, google, wikipedia, etc., which providing visitors access to more relevant information.

8. Ensure there are related keywords and terms on the page – body copy, meta-data, etc. Consider changing the destination page to a more relevant page in your site.

9. Only use unique content – don’t use scraped content, only use unique.

10. Add “About us” page – Add a clear and concise about us page.

Finally, if your site has experienced a major problem with the quality site i suggest you implement all the changes above, move your site to a new domain, and then open a new google account with a new credit card. This should wipe the slate clean, and bring you minimum bid back to 10p!