I've recently taken over our Adwords account for our company. Not knowing much about it before I started; I've been doing research like crazy for the past week. What I can't figure out is that we seem to be having a severe problem with our quality score universally across our Adwords account. We think this has to do with our landing pages. From the research I’ve done, a good way to determine if your landing page is relevant is to use the Keyword Tool on the page to see what keywords come up. If the keywords that show up are closely related to the keywords in your adgroup, then everything is fine. Unfortunately, the keywords that show up on our landing pages are nowhere near what is in our adgroups and some pages don’t come up with any keywords at all. Example 1: Our company is called Rod’s Western Palace. I started a campaign to bid on our brand name. All of my key words have a quality score between 2-4 despite being things like [rods western palace] [rods.com], etc. Obviously those are relevant because it’s who we are. If I use the keyword tool on our homepage (www.rods.com) only 2 of 300 keywords are even close to that. We have “Rod’s†listed 6 times in text on that page, but it doesn’t seem to pick that up. Example 2: While this page isn’t linked to an Ad currently, it illustrates this point. The page http://www.rods.com/topgiftskids.dlp when run through the keyword tool generates no keyword suggestions whatsoever. How can that be? Most of the page is written in text. Example 3: Our competitor, Cavender’s, has a landing page with ladies boots on it at http://www.cavenders.com/dept.asp?cat=8&dept_id=25. When I run that URL through the keyword tool it comes up with over 300 relevant search terms… some of which are not listed on that page anywhere. The brand name “Twisted X†shows up as a keyword for that page and it’s not listed at all. However, when you visit our page that acts as the same landing page for ladies boots, http://www.rods.com/Ladies-Western-Cowboy-Boots.html, we get 30 keyword suggestions… some of them not very relevant. Can anyone shed some light onto this for us?
1. Rod's is not your primary keyword nor should it be. Nobody knows you. Well, maybe those into that sort of thing do but they are not searching for you, they are searching for western boots for example so that's the sort of keyword to use. 1B. Quality score is all about how good as measured by click rate compared to competitors your ads are. In short, your ads are not attractive enough so your QS is low. Your keywords may be wrong too. 2. There's little text on the page for Google to figure out what you're about and this page is about many different kinds of products. It takes a best guess approach. 3. Did not look at that page but who cares? Do what is best for YOU. The keywords returned from a competitor's page doesn't make you any money.
On the third example, I'm not really so much look at it from a "my competitors are doing this, so I should too" standpoint... I'm looking at it from a more technical standpoint. I was basically using them as the closest example I could think of. On our Ladies Boot page we have more brands, more styles, etc but return far fewer keywords than their equivalent page. That tells me there is a technical reason for the difference. But I don't know enough about how Google is crawling the page to know why it can't pull out the same types of keywords.
The Google crawler is software and software can only do so much with the input it is given and it's program.
I understand that. The question is why isn't it finding the words I have on the page? The "input" is right there on the page in front of it. Why isn't it finding it? Is there something in the coding of the page that is preventing it from finding the words on the page?
From a on-page SEO point of view: Your keywords are: western wear, western clothing, jewelry, equine, artwork, horse tack, bits, saddles, breyer, cowboy, hat, boots, decor Your H1 tag is Ladies' Western Cowboy Boots You have no H2, H3, H4 tags Title Page = Ladies' Western Cowboy Boots Alt tag your images with relevant names The content has got to reflect what your keywords are. Lookup LSI - Latent Semantic Indexing, basically theming your page for the relevant terms Google would expect for your subject matter.
Maybe your account contains some keywords that Google don't like or Google think that will lower customer experience, so you can check your keywords first and see Google guidelines.