There is a huge amount of discussion about Google quality score, but I have news for you…getting a great quality score is not that hard.

In fact, I took a campaign from zero to hero in 5 minutes. See for yourself:

This campaign is actually one keyword phrase that I was doing testing on. As you can see, the impressions were effectively zero, and I couldn’t do ad variation testing when no one was looking at the ads. Prior to the changes, the quality score was “OK”.

So, I decided to tweak my landing page a bit to see if I could increase my quality score. As a basis for my tweaks, I used some very simple SEO concepts.

The first thing I checked was the frequency and location of the keywords on the landing page. One keyword was not even present, so I added that where it made sense. I also wanted the first two keywords of the phrase in the page title or near the top. Changing the title didn’t make any sense, so I created a header just below the title which was the first two keywords.

Next, I checked for general frequency of the keywords. Actually, the frequency was pretty good, so I only modified a couple locations where I could get the first and second keyword together. Again, I wanted the text to be natural not “keyword stuffing”.

That was it. A few minor additions and positioning changes, and I was finished. It only took about 5 minutes, and believe me, I am not speedy at editing my pages. The only thing left was to see how it affected the campaign.

I checked the quality score this morning, and it was now “Great”. I kept checking the impressions, but saw no activity at all. I finally noticed that the date range for the reporting was set to last week. I changed the repoting period to this month and, shazzam, impressions are through the roof. Now that is cool!

Achieving a good quality score is not all that difficult if you make sure your keywords and landing page are in alignment. If you follow the simple concepts above, you’ll have a good chance of increasing a poor quality score.

Next on my list is ad variation testing, because honestly, the CTR is horrid. One thing at a time.

Stay tuned.

Update

Here is an update of the graph with two full days of activity. The first day was a half day since I made the change at about 10 pm: