Google just announced that they have been testing for some time a change to the adwords QualityScore algorithm. It seems that if your landing page is more relevant to your adword’s campaign keywords then it will be cheaper and easier to rank higher for your Pay Per Click campaign. The quality of Landing Pages has always been a part of the Quality Score. Here is a quote directly from Google about what makes up the Quality Score. It looks like they are going to put more weight on this line item.

[While we continue to refine our Quality Score formulas for Google and the Search Network, the core components remain more or less the same:

The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on the Google domain; note that CTR on non-Google sites (such as AOL.com) only ever impacts Quality Score on our search partners – not on Google
Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
The quality of your landing page
The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
Other relevance factors]

That is a nice help for local small businesses that compete with national advertisers for ad space for local keywords. Now more than ever it is important to maximize your adwords campaign by optimizing your website for the keywords in your campaigns.

It will be nice to see a significant decrease in cost-per-click in some of my campaigns. If it’s significant I will make another post about the savings.

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Chris Gregory

Chris founded DAGMAR Marketing and directs all of the agency's SEO strategy development and implementation. He is a Certified Master SEO by Market Motive and OMCP.