Improve landing page quality score of commercial site?

Should I add more content?

[limitup]

We have a somewhat unique commercial site, in that we don't have a lot of content on the site because it's just not necessary. Basically people click on our ads (AdWords and others) and arrive at 1 single page that gives them all the info they need if they want to buy our product. Aside from the standard stuff like a contact page, privacy policy, newsletter subscribe/unsubscribe, etc. that's pretty much the entire site.

Would Google's perception of the "quality" of our landing page/site improve by adding additional content to the site in the form of articles, maybe a forum, etc. - even if 98% of our visitors could care less about this stuff?

What about getting incoming links, etc? (Which we don't really care about because 99% of our sales are generated by the massive advertising campaigns we do).

Is there anything else we can do to improve our landing page/quality score?

Since we spend so much on AdWords I figure it's worth doing anything we need to in order to "appease" the Google Bot, and hopefully increase our quality score and reduce CPCs over time.

Thanks!

[Pengi]

My view would be that it may pay to provide more content and information about your product. If this improves the QS it could both reduce your CPC and increase your traffic.

Get it right and your content can help to sell your product too, so it may improve your conversion rate too.

Think in terms of what the user who clicks on your ad may wan to know or find out - and answer all the questions you can imagine the user asking.

[kdobson99]

Yes, unfortunately while 98% of your customers don't care about this additional content, we are living in a new age. Therefore, we now spend time doing things to our commercial sites for the sole purpose of making google happy rather than our customers. But ask them how to improve in the natural results and they will tell you essentially, "don't worry about us, make your customer happy and you will be fine." This obviously isn't true for adwords.

How would you like your newspaper ad salesperson to walk into your store and say.... I know your customers are happy with your green carpet, but I think it should be red, and unless you change it, I'm going to charge you 5 times more for your newspaper ad?

Ok, I've been on the soapbox for a few days now. I'll get off of it and hope eventually things change in this regard.

[arieng]

I'm pretty sure that part of the AdWords QS equations is whether or the keyword you are bidding on exists on the landing page. I'm basing this off of a very large dataset and it seems very consistent across the account.

Try adding the your keywords to the landing page. If that doesn't work, you might want to create multiple version of the landing page, each with a unique bit of content that contains the keywords. This should reduce your QS without (hopefully) any duplicate content problems. Good luck and post any results you find. I'd love so outside feedback on this.

[pacweb]

Google's quality Scoreing is a Joke! Everytime I talk to Google and ask them, What I can do improve my quality score, they give the same standard answer, "improve content". There is nothing wrong with my current content. It matches exactly with my keywords. Over the past 6 months, Google has been slowly working on irredicating my site. First, they were eliminating my best performing keywords on search, then went the content network. Now, I am left with about 5 keywords out of 100 to work with. Hey, corporate downsizing still exists!

[limitup]

Thanks for the replies. I'd agree that having keywords on the landing pages plays some part of it, and can only help. We try to naturally include keywords where appropriate.

Of course, I wonder how complex their algorithm is in this regard. Is it as complex as their natural search algorithms? I wonder how many AdWords advertisers try to game the QS by stuffing more and more keywords into their landing pages? Is there an "over-optimization" penalty in regards to the QS? Hmm ...

What I'm really wondering about is "extra" content. I've talked to some people who are of the opinion that Google - or at least the QS bot - doesn't like sites that are TOO commercial i.e. just a salespage, etc. and that all else being equal, the site with "extra" content in the form of articles, etc. etc. will ultimately earn a better QS than the site that was just a salespage.

I'm not sure if there is a clear cut answer, and it seems like adding more content could only help, so I'm leaning in that direction. I guess it's no big thing to just hire someone to start writing an article or two a week for us.

It's just funny because I bet only 1 out of a 100 visitors to our site will care to read them lol. In our case, this extra content will truly be "worthless" to 99% of buyers.

[pacweb]

Google doesn't care about your visitors. It was mad clear to me yesterday, by my rep.

[BradleyT]

If I type in "discount espresso machine" I want to see sales pages. Google would be foolish to penalize "sales sites" in cases like this.

[RMedia]

limit, I'm in the same boat as you.

I have a product where they could give a rat's *** about having a bunch of extra content on the page. They are at my site because my prices are best. We have spent YEARS maximizing conversions of our traffic. Adding useless textual content is not going to benefit anyone but adwords, we already are ranked at the top of search engines, every customer understand our product and there is simply nothing else we can add in without watering down conversions.

Why do I have the feeling we are going to have to sacrifice a bit of conversions to make our sites "made for Adwords" :( They have officially put us in a horrible situation. I see no way out other than taking a drastic hit (which I already have) and if I'm making changes to a site that is at peak performance, I might get a few more clicks on adwords in the long run but now my conversions are going to suffer.

[RMedia]

arieng, I've tried your suggestion as well. I'm getting NO results for any of my short keywords. Some of the 3-5 word phrases it helps for though. If I want to bid on a 1 word phrase and pay top dollar because its more relevant and highest conversions, it should work like any other keyword as far as landing page keyword relevance/frequency but I have a big feeling they disagree :( It's just unfortunate I dont have the luxury of products with 2-3 word descriptions which people actually search for. Our adwords campaigns ran flawless for years (maybe a bump or two with competition every now and then) before this latest update.

[edited by: RMedia at 11:56 pm (utc) on Feb. 27, 2007]

[arieng]

We've had less than 1% of our keywords affected by the last QS update. We are a purely commercial site, and some of the landing pages have bare-bones content, literally just short product descriptions. The terms that have been affected are either very vague (product numbers that could apply to a million different businesses) or words that don't show up on the landing page (like misspellings, but even most of these are okay).

We do have very good click-through, length of visit, and conversion with our ppc traffic. Could Google be using toolbar data to evaluate the quality of a site based on visitor behavior?

[limitup]

I'm sure they do. And if you use their conversion tracking I'm sure they use that info somehow too. Your site sounds like ours. I wasn't asking the original question in regards to the recent QS update as we weren't really affected by it either. I was asking more just in terms of the big picture of QS and how it might work against a purely commercial site where the products/services being sold just aren't normally accompanied by a lot of supporting content.