I have recently been working on a Google Adwords pay per click campaign for one of our clients. Not unusual you may say, but the difference in this case was that the client was not interested in our natural SEO services, only PPC management. Obviously, we did try to explain the importance on on-page optimisation, link building and so on but some people are very firm about what they want and in this case it was PPC and PPC only. 

A few years ago, I would not have seen this as any kind of issue, but now paid search has changed. Gone are the days where you would bid for a keyword get your adverts listed and start seeing traffic. Now the top paid search engines (Yahoo, Google and MSN) all use something called “quality scoring”. Quality scoring can basically be defined as a focus on advert and landing page relevancy and quality, bid price and performance. 

What this means is that you need to make sure that you write adverts that include the keywords you are targeting and that are set-up to land on pages that are also focussed around those same keywords. Keep keywords, adverts and landing pages relevant and consistent. It is because PPC customers now need to think about optimising their landing pages that paid search is moving closer to SEO. 

I actually think that this is a very positive move. I for one was very mistrusting of paid advertising - clicking on a listing would only be followed by disappointment that I had been tricked into clicking on a website totally unrelated to my search query. Needless to say, people must have had very high bounce rates. So this improved quality system must be better for users as surely they must be getting more relevant paid results. It must be better for advertisers as although it might take a bit longer to set-up, the final outcome should be reduced bounce rate and, ultimately, a higher conversion rate. It must be great for the search engines as happy customers spend more!