If you didn’t see this coming then you weren’t paying attention:

(Source) Starting today, this load time factor will be incorporated into your keywords’ Quality Scores. Keywords with landing pages that load slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.

Load times have always been important to Google for web pages and SEO. A part of Google’s ranking algorithm has to do with load time. Slow loading pages have less influence. Now, this is true of landing pages with regard to pay per click campaigns. If you want a higher Quality Score and a lower minimum bid then you need to make that your landing pages load quickly. Here are some ways that you can do:

• Get rid of Flash files and files with a lot of memory needs
• Don’t display text in your images
• Use CSS
• Take out unnecessary Meta tags
• Put CSS and JavaScript in external files and reference them in your header
• Use fewer tables

In the competitive environment of PPC, faster loading times of your landing pages will result in better quality scores and lower minimum bids.

Caroline Melberg
Melberg Marketing
Blue Chip Marketing Tips
Small Business Mavericks

Tags: google adwords, landing page, load time, quality score

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 9:28 am and is filed under PPC for Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.