In the last few days I’ve been doing some research about the landing page quality score.

It’s all started when I’ve tried to set a PPC campaign to one of my websites. It’s an old website with lots of backlinks. This website ranking is very high for some competitive keywords. I am getting a lot of traffic from the three major search engines. 90% of the traffic is directly to the homepage. For some of the keywords you will find this website as number one on the first page and for some wider expressions you will still find it on the first page but in positions 2-5.

I’ve tried to put an ad on those keywords and on some of it variations. After I upload the campaign most of the keyword went from active to inactive. I’ve good a very low quality score – poor. Due to that the minimum bid was set to $1. It’s a very high bid for this website niche.

I found out that the landing page quality score that I know from the SEO world is different from what you will find with AdWords. Looks like that with organic results Google try to deliver the most relevant content based web page. With AdWords Google try to expose the user to the best relevant product or service for a given keywords. From Google AdWords guidelines you can get the hunch that their assumption is that who ever use PPC do it in order to make money and not to deliver information.

I did not find any solid proof for this theory. However, from putting together all the pieces of information that I found in the last days, I can almost say for sure that this theory is probably true or at least close to be true.

On of the things that I found is an article that was written by Dave Davis: How To Master the Google Landing Page Quality Score
Although this articles was written almost ten months ago it has some very good example on how two landing pages on the same website, using the same template, got different quality score. The first one got “poor” quality score while the second landing page got “great “quality score.
Take a look at the HTML code of both of the landing pages. You will notice the differences.

So, what next?
My goal is very simple. I will try to draw the guideline on how to get a “great” quality score. To do so, I’ve decided to develop a new website that for each of its sections I will try to get a “Great” quality score for different keyword group.
I will work according to the theory above. I will purchase a new domain so any historical data will not interfere with my experiment results. I will report to you my outcome.

I would like to apologies in advance that I will not reveal the website URL. Mainly because I am going to use it for an affiliate program that I’ve been thinking for a long time to promote. Secondly, I am sure that Larry and Sergey are reading my blog so let’s not give them extra information than they already have

If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my full feed RSS.