How To Improve Your Landing Page Quality Score

When creating a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign to test a new product or niche, you don’t want to spend a lot of time creating different landing pages for each Ad Group and/or keyword you want to target.  However, you need to make sure that your page is relevant to the user that clicks on your ad, and that your landing page is relevant for the keywords you are bidding on so that your “Quality Score” is high, and your prices are low!

I am going to give you the exact instructions for improving your landing page quality score by automatically generating relevant page title, H1 headings, and text specific for each of your PPC Ad Groups without having to create additional landing pages.  This will help you test a new campaign very quickly.  This trick uses PHP code, but you don’t have to worry because I am going to make it as simple as copy and paste.  No previous PHP knowledge required!

Here we go:

Step 1: Create your landing page using whatever method you are familiar with and name it “index.php”

Step 2: Paste the following code at the very top of the “index.php” file

<?php
  if ($_GET['keyword'] != "") {
    $keyword=ucwords(str_replace('-',' ',$_GET['keyword']));
  } else {
  $keyword="Default Phrase";
}
?>

Note: Update the 5th line to have your default text show up in case the parameter is not passed to index.php.  If you don’t know what this means, read the entire post and it will become clear.

Step 3: Anywhere on the page where you would like to use the custom text, place the following code, instead of the content you put there when you created the page:

<?php echo $keyword; ?>

Let’s say that your page title looked something like this:

<title>This is My Title</title>

You would change it to look like this instead:

<title><?php echo $keyword; ?></title>

Step 4: Upload the “index.php” file to your server and you are ready to use it.  However, I will show you another improvement in a second, so make sure to keep on reading.

Access the page with a browser, and you should see that the “default phrase” you entered in line 5 of Step 2 shows up.

Assuming your web server is www.mydomain.com and that you uploaded your index.php file to the root directory, access the page like this:

http://www.mydomain.com/?page=new-custom-title

You will now see that the title, and anything else (such as H1 heading) that you updated with the PHP code in Step 3 automatically updates on the page and shows up instead of the default text.

Note: Just separate the words in your phrase with “-” as I did in my example.

Now, when you create an ad group, you can use a URL that includes ?page=… to be super relevant to your keyword, which will help increase your Quality Score as well stick for the user whoc clicked in the ad.

BONUS Step: I don’t like the “ugly” URLs I showed you above, so I created yet another small hack that allows me to have “better looking” URLs.  Just paste this in your “.htaccess” file.  If you don’t have one, just create one and put the following code in place, then upload to your server.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html index.php?page=$1 [NC,L]

Now, you can have the same effect as the example above by accessing the file as a “.html” file.  For example:

http://www.mydomain.com/new-custom-title.html

This code will automatically use the requested “.html” file name to generate the tags for you, as long as a real “.html” file with that name does not exist.  Again, just use “-” to separate the words.

You can do a lot more with this trick by using multiple variables to change text in multiple areas of the page with different text in each area.  The example above will get you started and I will leave the rest to your imagination!