How Your Landing Page Can Affect Quality Score

One of the primary components of a keyword’s quality score is its landing page. Second only to clickthrough rate, the landing page is an important factor in determining the quality score. However, landing pages are often overlooked by pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers. Advertisers tend to build their sites with several goals in mind, some of which may not always be in line with their PPC and quality score goals.

As with many aspects of search engine marketing (SEM), relevance is king. The destination URL you use in your ads should always be the most relevant page on your site that relates to your ad copy. If you own a take-out-and-delivery Indian restaurant with an ad group themed around your vegetarian menu, you don’t want to send people who click on those ads to a homepage featuring a picture of tandoori chicken. Instead, create an individualized landing page that highlights your vegetarian menu and the benefits of eating a vegetarian diet, as well as possibly adding some unique content about the history of the vegetarian diet in India. Not only will this improve a visitor’s experience on your page, it will solidify to the search engines how relevant that page really is to the search term and ad copy.

Navigation is another major component of landing page optimization, since you need to provide the shortest path possible to the product or offer represented in your ad copy. The best-case scenario here is that the landing page is also the order form or has an “add to cart” option for your product or service (placed above the fold). Avoid any interfering elements like pop-ups and pop-unders, which create frustration for the visitor, and which may lead to a higher bounce rate. Another factor of navigation optimization is landing page load time. In Google, a keyword’s load time grade is shown in the Keyword Analysis field. If your ads are not being served because of slow load times, it will be indicated here.

One final key to landing page optimization is transparency. Make sure to provide your visitors all the important information about your business, such as customer service contacts and company leadership. If you collect any of their personal information, have a privacy policy that outlines what you will and will not do with that information. Do not require any sort of registration to see additional content on your site. And finally, don’t auto-install any software on a visitor’s computer or alter their browser settings (such as disabling the back button). These techniques engender distrust and will negatively impact your quality score.

By making your landing page more relevant, navigation-friendly, and transparent, the visitor’s experience is improved. Combine this with a high clickthrough rate, and you will see a dramatic increase in keyword quality scores, which will result in higher ad placements across the board.