Landing page quality score bridging the PPC / SEO gap

Does landing page quality score bridge the gap between PPC and SEO?

Landing pages are now assessed for relevance so keyword optimisation is important. Pages that have little or no content are penalised and currently this manifests itself by a jump in the minimum bid required to show an ad for that keyword.

So there is now a crossover between SEO and PPC with on page optimisation important for both organic rankings and paid search. It has always made sense though to make the landing page relevant to the keyword and the ad. It’s important from a usability and conversion perspective whether or not it plays a part in the quality score.

The outstanding questions I have relate to whether other SEO factors will also play a part in contributing to the quality score. What about links, anchor text , age of domain, quality of website etc? I’ve no reason to think that these factors are currently taken into account but I don’t actually know for sure or whether there are any plans to include other factors besides on page optimisation.

PPC has always been effective for new websites that don’t have any history so don’t have many links and other trust indicators. It’s also good for one-off promotions and offers that aren’t meant to be a permanent part of other product or service offerings. In these cases you don’t want the page indexed by the search engines at all. PPC also allows testing of short copy versus long copy, navigation and links out versus a stand alone sales letter etc. Having to take into consideration what will be good for a quality score will affect decisions on what works best.

SEO is competitive and web pages can’t be equally relevant as they are listed in an order. Subsequently the algorithm for determining relevance is not trivial. In contrast the “show quality score” column in the adWords report has three values “great”, “ok” and “poor”. Presumably the Google internal scoring is something different but it’s not known whether it’s along these lines or something much more complex in line with the SEO ranking algorithm.

Currently the landing page isn’t part of the quality score that determines ad rank but only the quality score that determines the minimum bid required. Here is the explanation of quality score and landing pages from Google adWords help.

Google seems to be targeting particular types of advertisers and the majority of campaigns aren’t affected. I had a look at the new quality score column when it was first introduced but now have it hidden because I can’t see that it offers any benefit at all. If anyone can point me to some benefits I’m happy to hear them but so long as my ads are running it doesn’t appear to make any actual difference regardless of the score. If it affected ad rank I’d pay a lot more attention obviously.

More information on quality score for both the current situation and likely changes for the future would be nice. However, uncertainty and change are part of the nature of search engine marketing.

So are PPC and SEO coming closer together? Possibly but not to any great extent just yet. I’d welcome any challenges on this though.