Navigation: This should be removed you don’t want to distract the visitor away from the offer and conversion action.
However you should include a link in your logo so the visitor can visit the main site if they wish to.
Include a footer with links so that the visitor and Google can see you are part of a larger site.

Header: This should be clear & relevant to the visitor so that they are encouraged to scan down, using large clear fonts and if possible dynamic keyword insertion to make the page more relevant to the visitor.

Site Text: This should support any claims you made in your adverts. For example if you offer a free trial in your advert you should make sure the text on your landing page and offer supports your advertising claim.
Don’t make the visitor wonder if they are in the right place tie up you ad copy and keywords with your landing page text and offer.
Text should be in short bullet points and contain your ad keywords, as visitors will scan your landing page rather than reading it.

Graphics: Are eye catching they should be consistent with and support the campaign you do not want them to distract from the offer.

Video: Include a video to highlight the benefits or your offering, you can then always A/B test video or text to see what converts best for you.
A video is a great way of providing the visitor with information without making the page overwhelming.

Form: Make the lead form obvious! It should be at the top of your page don’t make the mistake of having it below the fold.
The form itself should be short and sweet, the goal should be to only capture critical information as the less the visitor has to fill in on the form the higher the conversion rate.
The “Submit” button should be labeled as their action, for example “sign me up to the free trial” or “download my free e-book”
Try to draw the visitors eye to the submit button you can do this by using color and/or arrows to get their attention.

Social Media: Add a forward to a friend button so that your visitor can pass your landing page on to relevant people.

Focus: The goal of the page is to convert the visitor so keep the landing page simple and to the point, resist adding extra information about your company.

Test: Use Google Optimizer to test it is a great tool that allows you to do A/B and multi variant testing of your landing page/s.

Quality score can range between 1- 10 with 1 being the worst score and 10 being the best.

If you have a low quality score you can end up spending between $5-$10 per click.

Google uses your quality score to determine your ad position and keyword bid price.

If you have a high quality score you will find that your Cost per Click (CPC) will be a lot lower and your ad position will be higher.

It is important to ensure that your quality score is high, otherwise you could end up bidding allot more than the advertiser in position one only to find your ad is appearing at the bottom of page. By improving your quality score you can in turn reduce your CPC which will result in an improved ROI (if the keyword in question previously converted for you)

4 Components of Quality Score

Google quality score has 4 components: Ad relevancy, history, Click-thru-rate (CTR) and landing page quality.

1. Ad Relevancy – Google judges your quality on how relevant your ads are to your keywords. Small ad groups with tightly related keywords are the way forward, if possible just use one keyword per ad group and then include the keyword in the headline. This will automatically make your keyword highly relevant to the ad copy.
2. CTR –If your ad copy has a high CTR you will be rewarded with lower CPC, justification being if your ad has a high CTR it must be relevant to the users search term and thus improving the user experience. I would recommend continually split testing your ads to improve your CTR.
3. History – Google rewards customers who have been with them the longest. By looking at account history Google can identify who the long term, high quality advertisers are.
4. Landing Page Quality – It is important that your landing page is relevant and optimized for the keyword you are targeting. Google wants to provide its users with a fantastic experience; poorly optimized landing pages don’t provide this experience and thus you will be penalized with higher CPC’s.

So how can I improve my Quality Score?

a)      Good account management – ensure keywords are in small tightly related ad groups & keep an eye on keyword impressions; you don’t want keywords generating high impressions and no clicks.

b)      Split test Ads

c)       Build quality landing pages with relevant copy.

2) You will only pay 1c a click if there are no other bidders – Search Engines set there own minimum bids for keywords & this is partly determined by the quality and relevancy of your landing pages.

3) Broad match is ineffective- If used properly broad match can be effective you just need to ensure you use negative match types properly. Run the keyword through the Google keyword tool to get an idea of the keywords you will need to negative match.

4) Bidding high increases your quality score – This does not improve your quality score or lower your average cpc, as quality score is strongly linked to the relevancy of your landing page. However by bidding high you will generate allot of traffic and thus clicks which will give your account more history.

5) Google is the only search engine you should bother with -You should test other search engine, Google may have the highest volume but that doesn’t mean it will always deliver the best ROI for your campaign. For example people who search on MSN are much more likely to purchase a product than those on Yahoo. I recommend you to test Yahoo, Ask and Msn.

6) PPC has a effect on organic rankings – Not True

7) Advertising spend has an impact on quality score and therefore ad rank – Not True, even small advertisers can have low CPC it all depends upon their quality score.

PPC is to be only used short-term until you get natural rankings. – If your PPC campaign is getting you results and a good ROI there is no need to stop. You may start to get traffic from organic rankings but this doesn’t mean it will convert as well as traffic from your ppc campaign.

9) You only need to optimize your PPC account once – You cannot just set up your ppc campaign and forget about it. It will need continual tweaking, optimization and ads will need split testing.

10) You don’t need to optimize your site – You will need to optimize your site in order to increase landing page quality score and conversion. You will also want to carry out split testing and try slightly different page layouts.