Last week Google changed its algorithm for determining the quality score of landing pages being advertised in its pay-per-click program Adwords. This development had a major impact on the rankings and the cost-per-click price that advertisers are paying. This was done to improve the relevance of its paid search results, attempting to improve the user’s experience.

What is a Google's Quality Score?

Google's quality score is a rating number for how relevant your landing page is related to the keyword you are bidding on. The Quality Score is in place to keep the paid results in Google to be as relevant to the term searched as possible.

How does Google Determine the Quality Score of a Landing Page?

Google's quality score rating is a totally automated system that determines this number. Since there is no human involvement in this score, it is solely established by what Google's bot can read. If you do not have relevant text, H1, Meta tags, keywords, and descriptions on your landing page(s) your quality score has most likely suffered greatly.

Effects of a Low Quality Score

A low quality score will cause 1 of 3 things to happen within your ad campaign on Google.

1. Your ads will be pushed down on the results of the first couple of pages for each respective keyword.

2. You will see a huge spike in your cost-per-click amount (this is because lower rated pages need to spend more money to be listed).

3. Your keywords will become "inactive for search" which means that the combination of your quality score and maximum cost-per-click bid is not a high enough total score to even make paid search results.

How to Improve a Low Quality Score

A low quality score can only be improved by improving the on page relevance of your landing pages to the keywords you are bidding on. I personally would recommend creating at least 1 landing page for each Ad Group within your Adwords campaign. This may take some time, or money, but this action will lower your bidding cost and improve your paid results ranking which can easily save you thousands of dollars annually.