Whilst SEO can help you organically secure your space at the coveted top position on the first results page; you simply cannot reach that top spot without PPC-sponsored campaigns.

Google is looking to ensure that it directs its user to the most helpful and insightful page for a user’s query. To do this, they rely on the quality score.

The quality score determines how well you rank in Google and how relevant your ads and landing pages are to the user. As one of the key factors in how often your ads will appear when an in-market user enters a search query your campaigns are targeting, the quality score should be at the forefront of your consideration when it comes to optimizing your paid campaigns.

Below are our five top tips on how you can improve your quality score to help keep your brand/client in the competition of reaching that top spot.

1. Relevancy

Ultimately, a high-quality score comes down to relevancy, your campaign’s relevance, keywords, and landing pages to what the user is searching for.

Ensure the keywords that you are bidding on are extremely relevant to your campaign. From there, ensure that all ad copy and landing pages are relevant to these keywords.

2. Keywords

Leading on from relevancy, may seem obvious, but you must plan and incorporate keywords effectively and consistently throughout your ads and landing pages.

For example, a small change to a landing page title can indicate to Google to understand the landing page better as Google rates the relevancy of the landing page in regards to the keywords searched by the user.

3. Negative Keywords

As well as putting a focus on keywords, building up, updating and monitoring a campaign’s negative keyword lists will help significantly reduce the costs and improve your overall quality score.

By incorporating negative keywords, you ensure that people not in your target market won’t come across your ad by identified negative keywords. This helps to increase your overall Click Through Rate because those users who do see your ads are interested; an expected Click-Through Rate is one of the determining factors. So ensuring that your ads are only showing for the most relevant keywords is crucial.

4. Good Copy

It may sound simple, but original, relevant, persuasive ad copy is the best way to catch your audience’s attention. Sure, you may secure the top spot. However, your copy still needs to be enticing enough to click on.

The key to this is a good headline; you need to think of a somewhat clickbait-y headline, but still relevant to your keyword and landing page. Ensure you address any known pain points, and highlight the benefits of your products or services that convince an interested user that your business is more impactful, and will solve their problems, better than another.

Customers want your products and services to solve any known pain points, but in a way that seems they are getting the best quality or best deal.

5. Call To Action

A solid call to action is key to securing a web visitor’s custom. A call to action with clear instructions also helps address another factor in improving your quality score, User experience. Adverts that are informative, functional, and grants a good user experience will have a high-quality score.

A clear call to action will look like ‘click here ‘download now’ ‘contact us today.’It should also stand out on the page and direct users to the next step.

When improving the quality score of any PPC campaign, ultimately, you want to ensure that your ad copy is relevant to your targeted keywords, your landing page provides a good user experience, and your keywords are highly relevant to the services or products that you’re offering. The Good Marketer can be a great PPC agency for your business.

Written by: Tom Welbourne

A version of this article was first published on the DAN