Jason sent me the following question: “I put a lot of work into building a new Adwords campaign and I want to make sure I get good quality scores. Is there anything I need to do to my landing pages before launching the campaign? ”
Like I have said before, no one has the exact magic formula for Adwords success, but here are my recommendations.
- First of all, expect these steps to take several weeks before launching your Adwords campaigns. Its a slow process. If you want a quick speed test – try YSM or Adcenter. You can’t rush Google.
- Build your landing site/landing pages with lots of crawlable content, including the keywords you are targeting. Having one large hyperlinked graphic is not going to cut it. You need text with good basic SEO structure including H1 tags, alt image tags with keywords, etc. The keyword you are bidding on should appear on the landing page it is going to, so build it in there somehow.
- Include all these elements in your landing site: contact page, privacy page, about page, submit a sitemap, robots.txt, even a favicon. Make your site look like a real website – at least to the search engines. Validate code.
- Keep the pages light and fast loading. Another reason not to use huge images, now that Adwords factors load time into quality score. Sit back and wait for the next step.
- Make sure your pages are indexed before you launch the campaign. This may take a while, but be sure it is done. You can set up an account in the Webmaster console to check or use the command site:www.mydomain.com in Google to check indexed pages. Based on all the data I have seen, Adwords gives better quality scores when sending traffic to pages in its own index.
Adwords PPC 101 but isn’t it funny who real it is. Now if you’re doing Faceboob or MySpace ppc throw all that out the window and do the opposite. Their quality editors love the spammy stuff.
[...] Originally Posted by Sean Bissell Ahhh! Pajamma mamma! Good call! I had no idea you could get that view. Thank you! And yep… says that it’s "poor" quality score. Hmmm, now how to raise it up? Insert the keyword into the page? Thanks again, that really helped! -Sean cool if you run a report and download to csv you can actually see the number of your quality score like pagerank 0-10 to raise it up i would check out this post for starters: Adwords landing page pre launch steps | CDF Networks – Affiliate Marketing Blog [...]
True. Also, one thing that has worked for me is do directory submissions to your site. You can’t take the cheap route anymore. You will end up spending $100-$200 (including articles, coding, lp design, directory submission etc.) on building that site even before you start your ppc.
I agree. Anything you can do to build up the ranking before launching will help.
Image size on landing page doesn’t matter.
“Currently, landing page load time measures the time it takes to download the HTML content of your landing page.”
AdWords Help, How is landing page load time evaluated.
Ya, I saw that page – but they also say “in the future, the load time of images, flash, video, JavaScript, and other components will be considered as well”. So might as well build them that way now…
Chad, all your points are valid. I’ve noticed that once you have your campaign running for few months under one domain, it becomes much easier to get good quality score few new keywords. It works much like SEO. Once your site is well established in Google index, it is much easier to get new pages of your site indexed.
I also think following basic SEO techniques on your landing prior to launching will help in quality score.
yeah,very good steps.learning.
I hate having to go through all those steps for each little site I create, but it really does have to be done. I’ve tried taking the easy route too many times and my quality scores suffered.
Very informative, I need all the information I can get being a relative newbie.
Thanks for the tech information you have provided here. Something to learn by.
The comment about one hyper linked image had me off my chair, nice one.