I've been using adwords for a month now and keep noticing a strange difference in the QS of my keywords when the term's are almost the same. The problem I am having is when I use the term '*city* window cleaning' gets a QS of 3 or 4, but '*city* window cleaner' gets a quality score of 5, 6 or 7. I can't seem to figure out what the problem is, especially when my site is more optimized for 'window cleaning' than 'window cleaner'.
I understand that they are different terms, but I can't understand why it is different when my site is better optimized for the term. Eg: 'Window Cleaning Melbourne' has a QS of 4, yet it is in the page title, meta tags, keywords etc, surely that should be a higher score?
Quality Score has nothing to do with your on-page optimization. It has everything to do with the click rate of your keyword compared to others using that same keyword. Your keyword's CTR is compared to the historical average of all advertisers for that keyword. A standard deviation calculation is done. The higher away from the mean CTR, the higher your QS. Conversely, the lower away your CTR is from the mean, the lower your QS. As each keyword will have different historical averages (normalized by position BTW) and different standard deviations, even similar looking keywords will have different QS. Your own CTR on these keywords will likely be very different too.
Somehow I doubt Request has used Adwords much, if at all. He's still entitled to his opinion, humble as it may be. Many of the big guys are easy to beat. Being big and having the money doesn't mean anything. Just look at the NY Mets or Chicago Cubs. I beat the big guys all the time. You just need to understand a few things such as QS.
I've read all the adwords terms etc and I've found that the best way to get a good quality score is to make sure you don't try and game or fool google in any way. There are a ton of reasons why your page gets a good QS, but make sure that your basics like, Privacy policy, contact, disclaimer, sitemap are on the main page. ALos hide or cloak any affiliate links that you have on your site. And make sure you have outgoing links too to sites like wikipedia and other high info sites. Also include links to original articles within your website too. These are simple elements and always get me high quality scores.