One of the most common problems you’ll face while starting out in PPC is understanding Google’s “Quality Score”. If your ad and website do not conform to their guidelines and requirements, they will “slap you”. This means that they will increase your cost per click to prohibitive levels… virtually forcing you out of the game (or making you lose a lot of money).

Here are 7 quick tips to boost your quality score and avoid getting slapped.

1. Get your CTR up by split testing your ads
A high CTR is critical to show Google you deserve to be there. If people are clicking your ad then they must like what you have to say right?

2. Start off at a high initial price to put yourself in position 1
For some reason people click the ad in position 1 a lot more, but they tend to be timewasters just clicking the first thing that pops up so they are not good for sales, get a good CTR from being in position 1 then lower your bid after Google sees you have a good CTR

3. Make sure your ad is ‘relevant’
Google wants to see ‘relevance’ so your ad should have your keywords in it, try to put them all in twice if you can, once minimum. Don’t sacrifice a good message to stuff a keyword in, but make sure they are in there. You can also name the page they are going through to as your keywords, that way you can put that in the ‘display URL’ and get more relevance there.

4. Split ad groups down further
Again Google wants to see ‘relevance’ make sure they all have common words between them and there are no stragglers you just stuffed in there as you couldn’t put them elsewhere. Can you split them down further, do 50% of them also have another word in common? Then split them out into another ad group.

5. Try different matching options
If a keyword is getting a poor quality score with broad match try it with phrase or exact match.

6. Make sure your landing page is relevant
If you have an advert for blue widgets but your landing page does not mention blue widgets then it is not ‘relevant’ to your ad. Even worse, if your landing page only mentions red widgets then get ready to be slapped by Google! Put the exact keywords from your ad group in your landing page a few times including in the page title, this may mean making a custom landing page per ad group…

7. Make sure your landing page looks like an authority page
Human reviewers will come and look at your site after you put your ads live, they want to see professional advertisers. If you don’t have a privacy policy and legal disclaimer you can’t be that professional, if you don’t have a ‘contact us’ page then how reliable can you be? Also if you have crude graphics all over the place then you do not look professional. Fix it all and look like a pro to score well.