I recently launched a new website and Adwords campaign. My ad groups, keywords and landing pages have an 8 out of 10 quality score. This is a brand new website and a brand new campaign. Adwords calls this a "great" Quality Score. I'll describe the exact steps I took so you can duplicate them and get great quality scores as well.
First, the market is highly competitive. It's a market that all major news outlets said was hot and growing online in December 2008 despite the recession. I have over 500 keywords. I'll talk more about them in a minute, but I want to give you an idea of the scale of the campaign.
I started with the landing pages. I have unique, tailored landing page for each keyword. The whole key to a great quality score is having relevant ads and landing pages for your keywords. I recommend a strategy of having only one keyword per ad group. The entire strategy is freely available at adwords-marketing-tool.com. The strategy guide covers in detail all the concepts I'm about to summarize for creating a landing page. Get your free strategy guide at adwords-marketing-tool.com.
I'll briefly describe the steps to build a tailored landing page. You start with domain relevant to your market. Plus your domain should only be about your market. You don't want a domain, or a subdomain that covers many topics. Keep your domain targeted. Next, each page has the keyword as the landing page. For example, if the keyword is "college football", the page is named college-football.php. That puts the keyword in the url.
For each page, I have the keyword in the title tags, keywords meta tag, and description meta tag. I also have the keyword in the heading (h1) tags on the page. There is content tailored for the keyword on the landing page.
I have just said I have over 500 tailored landing pages. I did not write each by hand. Instead, I used the advanced strategy guide and the techniques described inside to automate this task. I spent about 25 hours over 5 days during Christmas to launch this website. It would have taken me weeks to create landing pages manually. Visit adwords-marketing-tool.com to get the advanced strategy guide and learn how you can automate website and campaign creation.
The last thing I did for each landing page was add a link to my sitemap, contact us and privacy policy pages. Google wants your website to look like more than a single page. It also wants you to be transparent and offer contact info and policies.
The next step was to tackle the keywords. I had about 20 high traffic keywords. These were not long tailed keywords. They were the top volume producers for the market. I wanted to append U.S. cities to the front of each keyword. This would turn high volume keywords into long tails, and simultaneously target geographic areas. This was the best way to attack this highly competitive market.
I used the free Adwords Bracket Tool at adwords-marketing-tool.com to generate my keywords. The free tool lets you combine a list of prefixes (or suffixes) to your keywords. I used the tool to append cities to front of my keywords. Imagine turning keyword x into "New York x, Los Angeles x, and Chicago x" automatically.
Finally, I need to create the Adwords campaign. Again, I used the campaign creator tool at adwords-marketing-tool.com. This generated the entire campaign in seconds, keywords, landing pages, ads and all.
That's it. That's how I generated a new campaign for a new website and got 8 out of 10 quality scores.
I still have some work to do. First, the market is so competitive, the expense is climbing rapidly. The good news is I have CTRs anywhere from 5% to 20%. I'm bidding a high CPC to get that high CTR for the first few weeks. Over the long haul, I will be able to lower the CPC and still have top placement due to the outstanding CTRs. Plus, I have is 8 out of 10 for 90% of the keywords, the others are 7. I do not have any 9 or 10 scores. I'm still chasing those.