Understanding quality score for lawyer marketing

If you are using a Google PPC to promote your lawyer services, it’s important to understand what Google’s Quality Score is. Google created a reporting tool called Quality Score to help focus advertiser’s attention for improving search relevancy in their ads. Quality Score is sometimes a mystery for many advertisers, but Google is attempting to provide metrics to help improve the overall ad quality. The principle is simple, the more relevant ads that align to searches, the higher ads will rank and even at a lower cost. For example, if someone searches “DUI laws”, make sure your ads and landing experiences discuss the current laws. If you are promoting your DUI Lawyer services by bidding on the term “DUI lawyer”, then create a separate ad instead.

How does Google create a quality score?

There are over 100 factors Google claims that go into determining a quality score, which is reported on a scale of 1 to 10. Ad’s click thru rate, and historical account performance are some of the main factors, but many other behind the scenes ratings such as landing page relevancy are combined together for the scoring. This rating scale they provide back to advertisers is a summary of how well their ads are doing. Values of 7 to 10 indicate a positive score and you should be enjoying the best CPC rate possible. When they report a 4 to 5 value, it’s an average rating and this is an indication that making changes may or may not improve your Quality Score. Finally, values in the range of 1 to 3, means your ad groups and landing pages will need serious attention. Also, ads with a 1 or 2 rating may not be displayed by Google and could require you bidding up and paying a lot more to have them displayed.

The most important action to take with Google’s Quality Score information is to review it. Google provides this reporting mechanism for law firms to understand how to become more relevant with their advertising. The actual values are not displayed by default, so you will have to select the keyword tab inside the Google Adwords and then click on the “Customize columns” to select the “Attributes” for displaying the values. An improved quality score should reduce your CPC spending and you should see an increase in the number of leads too.

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