Have you ever had a problem with Google over the quality score that they have assigned you with you Adwords ads? Yeah, I thought so. I think that all marketers have low quality scores once in a while.

And, as Google tightens up there standards, you might be encountering that problem more and more often. I know I do. So, just what does that quality score boil down to…
We all know from previous Google slaps that they want relevant content and to sense that your landing page is on a domain that has all those things like a disclaimer, a privacy policy, an about us page, and then is tied into a real website that is siloed at best.

You may have noticed that lately the quality score takes into account whether the visitor to your landing page sees immediately words relevant to their search in your title, headlines and first paragraph that are the same words that they searched for before they clicked on your PPC ad. What this has meant for me is to make landing pages specifically for each ad group or groups with common themes.

What it comes down to is more work on my part. If I don’t make these specific landing pages, and send traffic to one general landing page, I find that for some of my ad groups, Google gives me a low quality score and my ads are rarely shown on the SERPS. And, of course, that translates to rare conversions.

How do I overcome this problem with using the least of my time, this was my first thought. The key to this is that Google wants to have the content “relevant”. Meaning, as stated earlier, that the keyword is in the ad, the Tile, the keyword is in the H1 header, and in the first paragraph when visitors come to the landing page then they see them immediately.

So, I went to Google and searched for “landing page keyword insertion” to find what they had out there that would help me. What I found was anything from how to dynamically insert my keywords into my Adword ads to this great PHP keyword insertion script for inserting keywords into landing pages: http://www.semvironment.com/ppc-management-create-dynamic-landing-pages-in-15-minutes-or-less/

Does it work? You betcha…

My landing page for this experiment is one that I used for a number of key phrases. Google gave it a low quality score of 1 out of 10 and in my Adwords account they stated that it would be rarely shown. Here’s a screenshot of what my original, generic landing page looks like:

I started by putting the keyword insertion script into the title of my page:

This made it so that the keyword would become the new title and would be unique for each ad group. For instance, if the keyword is “Keyword Research Tool” then that phrase ends up showing as the title on the top Blue Bar:

I then put the insertion script into the H1 header:

I did the same thing with the H2 header. The page then looked like this in my html editor’s offline preview:

It doesn’t end here. To make this all happen you have to modify your destination URL in your Adword ad. This is done by adding “kw={keyword}” to the end of the URL to your landing page as I did below in my Adwords Editor:

Now when someone clicks on my ad they go to my landing page and it looks like this:

As you can see, a visitor clicking on my Google ad from my “keyword research tool” ad group and going to this page immediately sees that this landing page is relevant to what they were searching for. If they were to have been searching for “keyword management tool”, that would become the title and would be inserted in the H1 and H2 headers.

If the visitor clicked on my “keyword management tool” ad they would see:

The pages are much more relevant to each search and PPC click while my quality score immediately went from a poor score of 1 to a high score of 8. Thus Google was much more pleased with each of my ad groups and the ads are now being regularly served on their SERPS.

This is a nifty trick that I have now incorporated into all my Adwords campaigns and the conversion rate of my ad groups has dramatically increased. What a great time saver as I don’t have to make a unique landing page for each ad group although I still have to do this for each keyword theme.

Related Posts on Ristvin Marketing Blog

• September 6, 2009 -- Keyword Research – The Backbone of Affiliate Marketing
• July 23, 2009 -- Another Google Slap Penalizes Affiliate Marketers Using PPC
• March 15, 2009 -- Affiliate Marketing, PPC and My Experiences

I’ll have to admit, I’ve tried to do affiliate marketing in the past and have never been that profitable. Much of the lack of success I can contribute to my lackadaisical efforts and lack of good knowledge on how to do PPC marketing correctly.

When I first started affiliate marketing, my main method of advertising was through links on my webpages and articles I wrote. While you can get some clicks thru to the affiliate sales pages, they are few and far between and profits are low.

You need lots of clicks to make money with affiliate marketing and unless you have pages that get loads of traffic, marketing affiliates thru your web pages is a guaranteed flop.

I kind of gave up on the affiliate thing for awhile but since the first of the year, I’ve found myself in a financial squeeze like most Americans have. This prompted me to look into affiliate marketing again. I had learned a lot about Adwords and PPC marketing when I used Google Adwords to market a book that I wrote.

When I first began using Adwords, I lost a bundle because I was naive and inexperienced in using PPC and didn’t realize how quickly you can run up an advertising bill if you don’t know the ins and outs of the system. Through that experience, I quickly learned that on some PPC campaigns you don’t want to “broad match” your words unless you have a larger budget to work with (which I didn’t at the time).

Lately though, I’ve gotten wiser with my affiliate marketing. I’ve been a Clickbank affiliate for years and I’m now learning how to make the most out of that service. Just after the first of the year, I bought the Commission Blueprint course and increased my knowledge of PPC immensely. It was after going through that training that I began to understand fully how to maximize my returns with affiliate marketing.

I realized as I went through the course that I would need some extra software. Commission Blueprint shows you how to do everything manually but also shows you how to make things easier with some programs that will make life with affiliate marketing a breeze. One free piece of software they recommend and you definitely need is the Google Adwords Editor. This is a must to manage your campaigns and ad groups.

To go along with the Google Adwords Editor, the folks at Commission Blueprint recommends that you buy Speed PPC. It’s expensive! I decided that it would be nice to have, but I couldn’t really afford it at the time.

But right after I bought Commission Blueprint, they sent me an email telling me that they had found an inexpensive replacement that does everything that Speed PPC does plus much more…. It’s called Ad Grenade. I highly recommend it if you are going to “ramp up” your affiliate marketing endeavors.

PPC advertising all comes down to keywords. I have plenty of keyword finding software that I have used over time. Mainly Nichebot (now a full suite of keyword tools) and Keyword Elite. I figured that these would do me well with my affiliate marketing campaigns. Then came all the hype about Google Cash Detective and the online videos about what it could do for a marketing campaign.

This was a nifty software package that could reveal the competitors in just about any niche and show you which campaigns were successful and highly lucrative. But, even though I was making more profits than ever with my affiliate marketing, I wasn’t at the point where I felt I could afford the almost $2000/year to access this software.

I had watched the videos on Google Cash Detective and knew what it did. So, once again I started googling for something that I could afford that would do what it did. What I found was Brad Callen’s PPC Web Spy. It can do the spying on your niche competitors but not do the extensive drill down that GC Detective does.

Hmm… I thought to myself… I have Keyword Elite and Affiliate Elite already in my arsenal of research software. If I combine all the features of PPC Web Spy and these other two tools, I can pretty much do what GC Detective does, only it will take a bit longer to get all the information.

So, that’s what I’ve done. And over the past month, I’ve collected an enormous amount of data on the niches and keywords that I’ve been tracking. As a result of this, my affiliate marketing endeavors have become more profitable.

I should be ending this post, but before I do, I have to tell you about one more piece of software that has helped me get people to buy the affiliate products and services that I have been marketing. The landing page templates that I got with the Commission Blueprint course were a great help in getting people interested in buying. But you know…

People often back out when they click thru an affiliate link. You have to cloak them somehow. Any good information on affiliate marketing will tell you how to do this, but I found the slickest software to do this for you. It’s called Cloak N Rotate.

The nice thing about this software is that it not only cloaks your affiliate links… it makes it so that the visitors to your affiliate sales page see that the URL is on your domain and it allows you to add your own title and meta tags to the redirect. In this way, the search engines don’t see it as a redirect to an affiliate.

There are some other things this nifty software does but I’ll let you check that out. Just imagine though what this can do for your affiliate marketing…

With that said, I’ll go into some more of what I’ve learned about affiliate marketing in my next post…

Related Posts on Ristvin Marketing Blog

• October 4, 2009 -- Being a Clickbank Affiliate and Cloaking Your Affiliate links
• July 23, 2009 -- Another Google Slap Penalizes Affiliate Marketers Using PPC
• May 5, 2010 -- Build and Structure a Niche Affiliate Website…
• April 9, 2010 -- List Building… When You’re Promoting Another Merchant’s Product as an Affiliate
• March 7, 2010 -- Making Money With ClickBank

Imagine what it was like back in the dark ages before the advent of the internet. When a potential customer or client needed a product or a service, they ran to the phone book, fingered through it looking for a local business that would satisfy their needs. They might even spend some time calling and researching the different businesses in the category to figure out which best suited their particular needs.

Shift forward to the present. Today, the internet, more often than not, takes the place of the old phone book. People don’t want to spend hours calling businesses to find what they are looking for so they surf the web. Your local business website takes the place of your phone book ad.

Yes, your website is actually your online “ad”. I think this is where most small business owners go wrong. They see their website as their online “business card” (which should also be an ad). So, what’s the difference you ask?

The vast majority of local business websites that I’ve seen are made to portray the business’ image or brand. They basically state to the public, here we are, here’s what we do, come check us out. Often they portray this message in a very ego centric way, focusing on themselves and not the customer. What they really are is a logo, slogan, the business credentials, an email address and phone number.

Sounds like a yellow page ad, doesn’t it. This isn’t the type of online ad I’m referring to. A good ad, like a good website focuses on the customer and what they’re searching for, not on the business resume. visitors are viewing your website and thinking, “There’s a ton of businesses just like you”.

If Homer Simpson was viewing most local business websites, he would be saying “Who Cares?” or “So What?” and asking his famous question, “What’s in it For Me?”

Just what should your website look like? It shouldn’t be the static web 1.0 site that helped bring the dot coms down. This is the web 2.0. Web 2.0 brought interactivity to the internet. Those old static sites are like a one-sided relationship. And we all know where those lead to. They don’t work.

A local business website that focuses on the customer will shine through to visitors and distinguish itself from the competitors. Nowadays, visitors want to do something. They have gotten used to social websites, interaction, and community. So, give them something to do.

Give them something free to download. Offer a free report or whitepaper on your business’ product or service. Start a blog and ask for their opinion on your service or product. Do anything that gets your visitor involved. And… Then collect their information as qualified leads to future interaction and connectivity.

Giving them good content is as important as giving visitors something to do. The more customer-centric your content is, the more effective it will be. Stress the benefits of your product or service that directly relates to the visitor. Relate interesting facts and statistics about your business that the visitor can bond to. High interest stories about how your product or services has benefited past customers keep the visitor thinking about how you can help them too.

Have you noticed that most corporations now have a blog (or many specific blogs)? It works for local business websites too. People want their opinions known and valued. Blogs allow visitors and customers to put in their two cents. And this creates value for your website and business.

All of these act like a good ad that draws people to your products and services. They begin to trust you more when they find relevant content and are able to interact with you. You are able to grab the visitor’s information and keep in touch with future promotions, birthday specials and bargains.

It’s time to take you static online business card and make it a communicative ad that interacts with your visitors.

Related Posts on Ristvin Marketing Blog

• August 9, 2008 -- Every Website is an Ad

One concept that many small business website owners fail to grasp is that their website is actually an ad on the internet. When I consult with these website owners, I always ask them why they put up (or want to put up) their business website and what they think the intent of their site is.

The response to this question varies. It usually revolves around the fact that someone has told them they need a website to “brand” their company name and compete with other local businesses, or “everyone has one” or “I thought a website is what we needed to show off our business.”

Believe me, most of these sites reflect the clueless intent that their owners have when it comes to using the internet to promote their business. They fail to realize the important fact that their website is an advertising tool that can boost their sales conversions and profits.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there aren’t some very good, professionally done local business websites out there on the web. But so many of these are what I call “ego” sites. They’re the “here we are” and “look, we’re so great that you should hire us” types.

It’s not enough just to have a website online. You need to use that site as your advertising tool. Yes, your site should brand your company name, but that’s only part of what a good website should do.

I saw a restaurant website in a city I was visiting last spring that did a superb job at using their website to their advantage. The homepage was their main branding page.

It shouted their name to the public along with great image visuals of their cozy, warm atmosphere, including photos of the brilliant scenery that could be viewed from their dining rooms. There was a modest copy about their cuisine, historic location, famous chef, and helpful service.

Selected menu pages revolving around the specific types of cuisine they served attracted my attention because on each of these pages, they placed links to coupon specials that potential customers could print out and bring with them for discounts and free meal add-on’s.

Customers that presented these coupons to the management were asked if they wanted to be placed on their email newsletter list which would inform customers of special events in the area, meal deals, and “special, invitation only dining nights” at the restaurant that they would be first in line for.

All of the “ego” stuff was limited to the “about us” pages where it has a purpose. The main point that I’m trying to get across here is that this restaurant owner had seriously thought about where his website fit into his overall marketing strategy. He even had a page where you could submit a reservation request online and confirm it.

This restaurant owner realized, as many local business owners are realizing, that his website was an online advertisement and as such demands a strategy that will brand his business name in the minds of customers as well as supply a direct response method of bringing in more customers and converting sales into profit.

Related Posts on Ristvin Marketing Blog

• August 26, 2008 -- Is Your Website an Online Business Card or a Good Online Ad?