SECOND SIGHTING

A low keyword quality score is obviously a bad thing. It can lead to an increase in the keyword’s minimum bid, meaning it is no longer profitable. The method outlined below should give you a slightly higher quality score. It could be enough to make the keyword profitable again. It is best used in the following circumstances:

• Where your ad already seems highly relevant to the keyword, but for whatever reason AdWords still gives it a poor score.
• You are targetting a word or phrase that is not allowed to appear in your ad e.g. it is trademarked.

Imagine your keyword is monkey widgets but the word monkey is trademarked. To increase your score you need to mention widgets as often as possible in your ad. A good ad would be:

Cheap Widgets
Widgets, widgets & more widgets.
Get your widget today.

Its important to stuff that keyword in a few times. And a good idea too to mention both plural & singular variations of the word. In testing I have increased quality score from 2 out of 10 to 4 & 5 out of 10 for several keywords. 5 out of 10 means your keyword is listed as OK instead of Poor and the minimum bid can be reduced.

1. Add keywords till your brain is numb! You should be aiming for thousands of keywords, not just hundreds. It is boring as hell, but vital to a strong PPC campaign. Your competitor may be able to beat you on bid price, but you can beat them for free on keyword volume.
2. Keywords in an ad group should be very closely related. As a general rule of thumb I keep it to regional varations and where the words are in a different order e.g. blue widgets & widgets blue. This will help keep your keyword’s Quality Score high and your CPC low.
3. Be aggressive with your choice of keywords, bid on whatever you can get away with. These are often some of the best converting terms.
4. Do not bid too high on new campaigns just to quickly find keywords that convert. Your aim should be to run a profitable campaign right from the start.
5. Spot trends amongst your keywords. If a keyword performs really well, are there variations or synonyms of this keyword that you could add to your campaign? Also consider bidding higher for this keyword and closely related terms.
6. Only delete keywords if they do not convert at all. If a term converts very occasionally, but not enough to justify its current bid price, just lower your maximum bid. It’s better to have keywords show on page 2 or 3 than not show at all. You won’t get many conversions, but they are better than none!
7. When adding new keywords, consider stepping your bid amounts according to match type. Broad match should have the lowest bids, then phrase match, then exact match. See my post on match type ROI for more information.
8. Keyword research tools help you get a campaign off the ground quickly. Copyblogger has a few nice reviews on keyword research tools.
9. When you consider that 25% of search engine queries are new, its worth spending some time coming up with your own keywords. To help me do this I often think in themes - how would a poor person search for this product? what would someone type in if they were in urgent need of a service? Then I set myself a target of say 20 keywords for each theme.
   
10. Be wary of bidding on keywords that are too generic, for example loans. Bids will be hugely competitive and such terms are frequently targeted by click fraud. You are unlikely to make any money on these.
11. When deciding how much to bid or when to delete a keyword, bear in mind that only around 85% of your PPC traffic will be from valid searches. Some clicks on your ads will be accidental, a few will be click fraud, some will be competitors trying to lose you money [but conversely helping your CTR!].