How valuable is Google’s Quality Score? Should it be an influential metric for your PPC campaigns?

According to Google, “Your Quality Score reflects your keyword’s CTR and the relevance of your ad text and landing page. Keywords with high Quality Scores are more relevant for users, more effective for your ad campaigns, and have lower minimum CPC bids.”

Keywords can have one of three Quality Score states:

• Great: Your keyword is very relevant and your Quality Score needs no improvement.
• OK: Your keyword is relevant, but you can still benefit from a higher Quality Score.
• Poor: This keyword isn’t very relevant to users and we suggest you replace it with a more specific keyword. If you would like to keep advertising with this keyword, we recommend optimizing by using more targeted ad text and improving your landing page content.

To learn more about how the quality score is calculated, visit AdWords Help.

To view your quality score, go to the keyword level of your campaigns and click customize columns. There will be an option to ‘Show Quality Score.’

Interested in learning more about Google’s Quality Score, I contacted support. There are several intersting things that I learned:

• The Quality Score is not yet a column that can be added to your reports (So how do I find the keywords that Google considers to be “Poor” and “need optimizing” according to Google?)
• The Quality Score algorithm is constantly changing and if it were on a report you “may not want to make a decision based on that data.”

In our opinion, the quality score is not valuable in of itself. There are so many variables that contribute to the success of a keyword that to perform an evaluation based on this metric alone would be short-sighted.

We recommend keeping an eye on keywords Google deems to have a “Poor” Quality Score (we haven’t found any yet in our campaigns) and evaluate if there is an opportunity for improvement.

Much can be said about website analytics, from various platforms, technologies, segmentation strategies etc. However, the average marketing manager rarely has the time to sort through the wealth of data most website analytics software offer. This is a very common discussion point with our clients. “What should I really track?” Your website analytics data is more than just numbers, web traffic analysis reports should help you to increase your ROI. Understand your visitors, how they are getting to your site, and what they are doing, and help establish areas for continues improvements.

In short, once we identify goals and objectives, we suggest to establishing key performance indicators for the following data points:

• Monthly unique visitors
• Monthly bounce rates
• Analyze conversion ratios (Identify reasons for failure)
• Landing page analysis
• Return on Investment (ROI) analysis
• Monitor how users find your site
• User behavior, demographics, and click streams

Of course a key variable to establishing your key performance indicators is the nature of your site;

• Lead Generation
• Commerce
• Support
• Content (subscription)

We suggest establishing unique KPI’s for each of the above site models and picking an analytics solution that can provide you with the appropriate data.

We recommend using PixelAnalyst. In addition to being easy to use, PixelAnalyst is a dynamic and powerful analytics platform.

The technology platform of your website has serious implications in your search engine optimization efforts. Often times in the development of sophisticated content management systems and ecommerce engines marketing and SEO take a back seat to functionality.

But that should not happen. If you build a system right, it will not only be “SEO friendly”, but often times can help streamline your SEO efforts. The trouble is that it is very rare to find a development team that understands the implications for SEO and coordinates with your online marketing agency.

A great search engine optimized technology platform should, at a minimum, allow for the following:

• Creation and management of unique page titles, meta tags, and URLs
• Output of clean XHTML code
• Mechanisms to maintain the integrity of the above

So how do you evaluate if your content management system or technology platform put SEO in the back seat? Look for these signs -

• Long complicated URLs (index.php?content=aboutuspagenumber12)
• Messy HTML code (multiple header or body tags, random CMS generated style sheets)
• Short non-descriptive or repetitive title tags (ie: Company Name - About)
• The inability to control any of the above

Optimizing a technology platform can be a lot of work, so be sure to evaluate if you are better off just rebuilding the platform rather than trying to plug a sinking ship.

We often read about the usage of 301 redirects as the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. However, rarely there is a mention of 301 redirects used to eliminate the potential for duplicate content. So, we’ve decided to share a bit.

Google (or any other major search engine) considers pages found within www versus non-www (www.yourdomain.com versus yourdomain.com) as different. Most of us would think they are the same, thus assuming www.domain.com, and domain.com are the same. Actually they are not. From a search engine perspective, they are treated differently in that some content can be considered as duplicate content. Furthermore, having www.domain.com, and domain.com can cause the negative effects of link fragmentation, meaning some links are pointing to domain.com and some to www.domain.com.

So how do we address this potential problem?

If you running apache, add the following code to your htaccess file in the root of your website:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

You’d be amazed how many webmaster miss this simple, but critical aspect of sound SEO.

An XML sitemap is an XML document that is submitted to the search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc) that essentially tells them where all your pages are located. It assists them in the crawling of your website. Google and Yahoo used to have their own XML format, but now there is a standardized protocol that can be used for both. Check out sitemaps.org for more details.

The format of the XML sitemap is the least of your worries, its fairly simple and basically is just a list of urls with frequency of updates and last modified dates. For a small site there are many tools available, both offline and online that make building a sitemap a piece of cake. Building sitemaps for websites with thousands of pages is when it gets tricky.

Google has a list on their website of all different types of tools. For a simple website that isn’t too big, I would recommend trying XML Sitemaps or Site Map Generator (yes, they all have very unique product names). They are both online tools and work pretty well, for the smaller sites that is (under 1000 pages).

For larger sites, with thousands of pages, there are the a few things to keep in mind:

1. It can take a long time to index a large site (hours, maybe days) - the site map generators spider the site like a search engine do
2. Your servers response time dramatically affects how long it takes to generate
3. Google only accepts 50,000 URLs per sitemap and files less than 10mb - if you have more than 50,000 URLs you have to break it into multiple sitemaps
4. Building a sitemap that spiders your site with multiple spiders (threads) can speed up the process, but can slow down the site for other users

I have tried several of the 3rd party downloadable tools on Google’s page, and nothing has impressed me. So far I have tried

• CoffeCup - simple to use, good for small sites
• A1 Sitemap Generator - just froze when I tried to start spidering
• GSiteCrawler - worked pretty well, a little complicated, more for the technical minded individual

Next up is Unlimited Sitemap Generator by xml-sitemaps.com.

More to come. Stay tuned.