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Digital marketers often prioritize three things: quality content, quality website and the best value. While these are important elements to consider, you should not overlook the importance of your Quality Score within your search engine marketing (SEM) strategy.
Since March 2017’s Fred Event, one of the most pressing issues revealed was website quality. Google defines quality score as an aggregate estimate of ad quality, keywords and landing pages.
What is Quality Score?
Quality score is a valuation Google applies to Google Ad campaigns where they rate the quality and relevance of your PPC ads, keywords and landing pages. They use this rating to calculate your CPC (cost per click) times your max bid establish your ad position in their auction process.
Quality Guidelines
Google’s Search Quality Guidelines advise rating teams on the right way to identify low-quality pages on the Internet. The seventh section also reinforces the primary goal of websites: to be helpful and not become a nuisance to users.
What are the characteristics of a low-quality website?
Excessive Monetizing of Content
For Google, a webpage is deceptive if it tricks both the search engine and its user AKA Clickbait. In such instances, the search engine qualifies these websites as low quality.
The Fred update emphasized the negative impact of over-monetizing content on a web page’s search performance. Google is no stranger to such websites, which fuelled the search engine’s intention of taking greater steps against excessive monetizing ads and affiliate links.
Unnatural Internal Structural Links
Since 2012, Google has been adding to its list of low-quality criteria. It began when the company filed a patent which directly targeted websites that repeat internal links cross footers and sidebars. It used to be quality SEO technique, but the strategy resulted in an unnatural form of manipulation.
For marketers, such tactics are nothing new. Compared to more obvious signs that reveal a website is not to be trusted (e.g. spam pages or content), these are less obvious factors to track.
Financial Information Pages
Websites that provide advice or guidance for financial matters (and also provide products and services) should offer the highest quality of content. It’s no longer about stuffing your content or the old keywords meta tag with your keyword phrases.
Individual pages shouldn’t just rank for individual keywords; otherwise, Google will consider it a low-quality page.
Over to you
Perfecting the art of PPC is a challenge but still doable. A big part of your campaign success requires that your ads are helpful to users and not just for monetary gain.
So, take the time understand the challenges of your audience and create your campaigns around buyer personas. Put the user first and you will benefit in the long run.
