SEA requires SEO

There is a good development in SEA. Landing page relevance is becoming more and more important for your ads! This means you can save more then half your advertising budget or get double the clicks, just by knowing both SEO and SEA. In this article I will give some information to influence the Quality score in Google.

Google Adwords quality scores
First let me tell you there are two distinct quality scores in use with Adwords. One influences your minimum bidprice and one influences your actual cost per click and ranking.

Minimum bid price
The minimum bid price is the cost per click you have to pay to have your ad appear. Even if there are no competitors, your keyword will be placed on hold if you bid less.

Minimum bid prices are mainly based on:

• The historic relevance of your (entire) site to a certain topic.
• The relevance of the used landing page to the used keyword.
• And the popularity of the keyword.

As you can see you can’t just bid on any keyword with any website and any page. You can, but you pay much more. Bidding on a new unrelated hype just to get large amounts of traffic is therefore much harder to do.

The relevance of both website and landing page isn’t only based on the text, but also on relevant links to them. A page that scores or could score organicly is therefore the best landing page and SEA (search engine advertising) needs good SEO (search engine optimization) now, more then ever.

Ranking quality score
A high ranking quality score gives you a higher ranking or lower actual cost-per-click than a competitor that has a lower quality score.

The ranking quality score is more based on coherence between keyword, ad text and landing page, than actual organic ranking. Both ad text and landing page need to include the keyword and related words. Ad text and landing page need to have simular content so the algorithm can detect if the promise you make in the ad is kept on the landing page and is not some trick to boost the click through rate.

Ranking quality score is mainly based on:

• Historic click-through-rate on the used keyword matching option.
• Historic click-through-rate on the used ad (title, description and landing page).
• Historic click-through-rate on your account, campaign and ad-group.
• Used matching options.
• Bounce rate (direct returns to Google after clicking the ad).
• Ad relevance to keyword.
• Landing page relevance to keyword.
• Coherence between ad and landing page.
• Not as important, but will be in the near future: Organic ranking of the landing page.

It is not as much that you need a good SEO to influence these factors, but you need a good copywriter with expertise in search. Your copywriter should know how to take all these factors in to account.

How to!
Here is one way to start a good ad campaign and paying as little as possible:

1. Define keywords that are relevant to your website or create relevant webcontent first (to lower minimum bid prices). Group them so one ad text and landing page can cover the entire group. This probably means small groups.
2. Search your own website for each keyword and optimize a high scoring page as the landing page for that keyword or small group of keywords. Do extra linkbuilding and wait for organic ranking first if the minimum bid price is too high.
3. Enter the keywords as exact match and broad/phrase match and supply as much negative keywords as you can think of. Make sure you’re able to measure the exact typed-in search phrases in your web analytics.
4. Create an ad text that is different from all the other ads ranking for those keywords. Click-through-rate is mainly based on: Offering what one searched (ad relevance), offering something seemingly better then the other ads (ad specs) and sticking out from the crowd (ad call-to-action and ad position).
5. Enter the landing page URL exactly as the page scoring in organic search. Without any URL differences you could use to recognise adwords visits.
6. Find out/guess what position other than the first one is highly visible with your ad text sticking out from the surrounding ads. Aim for this position when setting your maximum cost per click. Start bidding high, but when your historic click through rates increase you can lower your bid to keep the same ad position. Adwords also has a prefered position setting, so use this to automatically lower your CPC in time.
7. Set the daily budget high at first so you can do keyword research. If you don’t add all your ads at the same time and finetune before you add another, you can see what keyword potential is available and you get a representative percentage of searches to finetune the different matches.
8. Add the ad group and start by finetuning your search terms. Look at your web analytics and see what exact phrases are used within the broad/phrase match. Enter all of them as exact match, but use negative matches for the ones that are irrelevant for your website. If they are just irrelevant for that particular landing page, create a different ad group with a better landing page.
9. Then finetune your ad text. Enter two or three slightly different ad versions and see what ad text converts best measured in click-through-rate.
10. If one ad is chosen as the winner, reflect that ad text in your landing page. Preferably you should use the same title and description.
11. Once you have almost no clicks on your broad/phrase matches - because you use exact and negative matches that include everything contained in them - then you can activate a second ad group and repeat the whole process.

SEA requires SEO
By doing all the above you get high click-through-rates, high relevance to keep your visitors, low minimum bid prices and lower average cost per clicks. Most SEA agencies do only CPC bid management to increase the effect of your ad and lower the cost. It is about time they include ad and landing page relevance in their routine too.

Indicators of ad and landing page relevance are the same as indicators for organic relevance. Most search engines just don’t use all their organic spam filtering on quality scores because there isn’t that much landing page spam yet. As more sites start influencing relevance in the quality score artificially search engines are bound to add more spam filters and SEA pricing will become SEO work.

Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 12:35 pm | Tutorials, Algorithms, Usability, Search advertising
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