Posts Tagged ‘quality score’

• Google Adwords Auctions

  Thursday, November 17th, 2011

  

  Wordstream.com have created an infographic showing how Google Adwords auctions work. For many, the auction may be a mystery, but this graphic shows quite clearly how it works.

  If you have not yet read our PPC book (available from Amazon), you may want to check out Tips 66 – 68 about keeping your Quality Score as high as possible, just for starters. Maintaining your Quality Score could save you a fortune in successful bids for a high ranking, and although there are multiple factors which affect your PPC campaigns, QS is one of those which should be a top priority.

  The fact that PPC is now an extremely complex subject that requires time and dedication (Tip 9 in the PPC book) is one of the reasons why involving a specialist/ PPC internet marketing agency with experience should be considered (Tip 100).

  However, never put all of your eggs in one basket. PPC can help you to quickly find the search terms and keywords for your on and off page optimisation, link building, social media activity, and more. Understanding how your potential customers and audience search, and which terms trigger a click, can be researched through PPC, and then the results of this research can be deployed in your other internet marketing activities.

  Understanding the search queries that Google enters your keywords and phrases into for the auctions is of paramount importance, and for this you should spend as much time as possible studying your analytics. (Tips 78-80) Or your agency should.

  This will help to build a picture of the audience with whom you are having maximum success, as well as which long tail terms are leading consumers to you. There may also be unexpected markets for your products which you can remain unaware of if you ignore your analytics and the in-depth information available to you. For instance, once you have set up goals for visitors to your site, you may see results of goal completion from referrals you had not sought nor been aware of.

  So, a website, forum, blog, twitter or social media user may be regularly feeding customers to your site who complete an action, such as a purchase or download, from a target market that you had not considered. Harnessing these actions by actively engaging with that market and creating PPC ads specifically for those that complete can help to keep your QS high.

  The following infographic will help you to understand Google Adwords auctions and benefit from the simple steps (outlined in the 101 Guide) or suggested/utilised by your agency to ensure Value For Money from your PPC budget.

  

  © 2011 WordStream

  Tags: adwords, Auction, Google, Pay Per Click (PPC), PPC, quality score, value for money
  Posted in Blog, Google, Pay Per Click (PPC)

• Quick fixes for low quality pages post-Panda

  Monday, March 14th, 2011

  Whilst the noise about the Google Panda update (previously called the Farmer update) is beginning to die down, there will still be many websites who should consider the value and quality of all their content and how this may reduce their chances of good listing in the SERPs.

  The obvious contenders may not be those you first assume. Aged and static content that has not been updated for some time may actually be bringing in long tail traffic, so don’t just bin old pages without checking your traffic stats and backlinks for those pages first. However, it may be that your business has changed direction since that content was added and it is no longer relevant, so take a look at some of your historic content to ensure it still fits the bill.

  More likely culprits for content deemed to be of low quality by the search engines are those which may seem far too similar to other pages on other sites. For instance, if you sell products with a generic product description that other companies also sell, and you have one page per product (required for inclusion in Google Shopping/Base), these product pages may not appear unique to the spiders.

  A quick fix would be to add the capability for reviews and testimonials. Until those reviews begin to appear on your site, add a “no index” tag, and then manually remove this from any pages where reviews have been added. You can request reviews from your customers for products that they have purchased, which will also give you a chance to get in touch with your customers and ask for feedback.

  Other low quality pages may be a links page that includes broken links, links to irrelevant content, or links which are not providing any link juice to your site. Keep a weather eye on any links on your site to ensure that these are working, relevant and worthwhile.

  Check your traffic stats (analytics) to see which pages are rarely visited or have high bounce rates. Check to see why this might be the case – is navigation difficult to reach that page? Is the content out of date or off-topic for your target audience? A quick revamp of your navigation or content may be all that is required to raise the quality score for that page.

  And whilst we are talking about Quality Score – take a good look at your PPC, or ensure that your internet marketing agency understands how Quality Score works. One or two keywords in your Pay Per Click campaign that are not performing as they should can have a decidedly negative effect on your QS rating, which will affect your PPC positions.

  Tags: Content, farmer, Google, links, Panda, PPC, quality, quality score, search engine, spiders, traffic stats, update
  Posted in Blog, Google, Link Marketing, Pay Per Click (PPC), SEO, Tips & Tricks, Website Usability

• Landing page load time in Adwords quality score

  Friday, May 9th, 2008

  Google Adwords has announced on the Inside Adwords blog the introduction of a new factor in its Quality Score algorithm. On the Keyword Analysis page, the keyword is graded based on the time the page takes to load and given a score of:

  • This page loads slowly
  • No problems found
  • No problems found. Load time is faster than average in your server’s geographic region.

  This can negatively or positively affect a keyword’s quality score and subsequently it’s minimum bid.

  This brings to light the question: If Google has developed a system to grade the landing page load time, how long will it be before the same system is used on natural listings to weed out bloated flash front ends and pages that redirect several times before reaching their final destination? Or is that where the technology came from originally?

  Tags: adwords, load time, quality score
  Posted in Pay Per Click (PPC)