Most advertisers look at their Google Ads quality score the same way they look at a credit score: they know it matters, they vaguely understand that higher is better, and they mostly ignore it until something goes wrong. If that’s you, no judgment. But ignoring it is expensive in ways that don’t always show up where you’d expect them to.
The score itself is a number from one to ten. Simple enough. But what it represents is Google’s assessment of how well your ad, your keyword, and your landing page work together to serve someone’s search intent. That’s not a small thing. Google is running an auction every time someone types a query, and your quality score is one of the biggest inputs into where your ad lands and what you pay for that placement.
We’ve audited a lot of ad accounts over the years. Accounts for roofers, HVAC companies, healthcare providers, financial firms. The pattern is almost always the same: the advertiser is spending real money, the campaign looks technically functional, and the quality scores are sitting between four and six like a car idling in park. Nobody’s asking why. The bills keep coming. The results feel flat.
That’s what this is about. Not a quick-fix checklist, but actually understanding what the score is measuring and what it’s trying to tell you about your own account.
The Three Things Google Is Actually Grading
Quality score is built from three components, and they don’t carry equal weight. Expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Google looks at each one and labels it below average, average, or above average. The overall score you see is a composite of all three, but the components are where the real diagnostic information lives.
Expected click-through rate is not the same as your actual CTR. It’s Google’s prediction of how likely your ad is to get clicked when it shows up for a particular keyword, relative to other ads that have shown for that same keyword. The word “relative” matters there. You could have a solid click-through rate in absolute terms and still score poorly on this component if the other ads competing for that keyword are better.
Ad relevance is about the degree to which your ad text matches the intent behind the keyword. If someone searches “emergency roof repair” and your ad says “Quality Roofing Services Since 1998,” there’s a relevance gap. Your ad isn’t wrong, but it doesn’t answer what the person is actually asking. Google notices that. So does the person searching.
Landing page experience is the one most advertisers underestimate. Google is sending a bot to evaluate your page, and it’s looking at things like load time, mobile usability, how closely the page content matches the keyword and ad text, and whether the page makes it easy for a visitor to take action. A slow page with generic copy will tank this component, even if your ad is perfectly written.
Why a Low Score Costs You More Than You Think
Here’s the part that tends to get people’s attention. Google uses something called Ad Rank to determine where your ad appears in the results. Ad Rank is calculated by multiplying your maximum bid by your quality score, plus a few additional factors around expected impact of ad extensions. So a higher quality score can get you a better position at a lower cost-per-click than a competitor who’s bidding more than you.
That’s not theoretical. WordStream found that advertisers with quality scores of eight or above can pay up to 50% less per click than the average, while advertisers with scores of four or below can pay up to 400% more. Read that second number again. Not 40%. Four hundred percent. You could be paying four times the market rate for a click because your landing page loads slowly and your ad copy doesn’t match the keyword.
Most people think Google Ads is primarily a bidding war. It’s partly that, but it’s also a relevance war. And relevance is something you can actually control, which is more than you can say about a competitor’s budget.
The Relationship Between Keywords and Ad Groups
One of the most common structural problems we see is ad groups that are too broad. An advertiser will create a single ad group called “Plumbing Services” and throw twenty different keywords into it: water heater repair, drain cleaning, emergency plumber, pipe replacement, bathroom remodel, and so on. Then they write one or two ads for that group and point everything to the homepage.
The problem is that no single ad can be highly relevant to all of those keywords at once. “Emergency plumber near me” and “bathroom remodel cost” are completely different searches with completely different intent. An ad that speaks to urgency and speed works for the first one. An ad about design options and financing works for the second. You cannot write one ad that does both well.
The fix is tighter ad groups, sometimes called single keyword ad groups or SKAGs, though in practice you can group closely related keyword variations together without going all the way to one keyword per group. The goal is that every keyword in the group should be well-served by every ad in the group. When you can say that honestly, your relevance scores improve.
It takes more work to set up this way. That’s exactly why most accounts aren’t structured this way. But the payoff in quality score, and therefore in cost-per-click, is real enough that it’s worth doing properly from the start.
How to Actually Improve Your Google Ads Quality Score
If you open your Google Ads account and look at quality scores by keyword, you’ll likely find a range. Some keywords will be sitting at seven or eight. Others will be at three or four. The temptation is to try to fix everything at once. Don’t do that. Start with the keywords that have significant spend and low scores, because those are the ones costing you the most right now.
Pull up the component breakdown for each of those keywords. If ad relevance is the problem, your fix lives in the ad copy. If landing page experience is the problem, your fix lives on the website. If expected CTR is the problem, you might have a headline issue, or you might have a keyword that’s inherently difficult to write a compelling ad for. Each problem has a different solution, and treating them the same wastes time.
Writing Ad Copy That Matches Keyword Intent
The simplest principle here is that your ad should answer the question the keyword implies. If someone types “how much does HVAC installation cost,” they’re in research mode. An ad that leads with price ranges or cost transparency will outperform an ad that just says “Trusted HVAC Company.” The person told you what they want to know. Tell them.
You can also include the keyword directly in the headline, which Google tends to reward. Not by stuffing it awkwardly, but by writing a headline that naturally incorporates the phrase. If the keyword is “emergency roof repair Duluth,” a headline like “24-Hour Emergency Roof Repair in Duluth” hits the relevance signal without feeling forced.
Responsive search ads make this easier and harder at the same time. You’re providing multiple headline and description options and letting Google mix and match them. The advantage is that Google can test combinations and find what works. The disadvantage is that if your headlines aren’t all individually strong, the combinations Google picks might not be great either. Write headlines that work on their own, not just in the context of a particular description.
Landing Pages Do More Work Than You Think
Send traffic to a page that actually matches the ad. That sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how often someone clicks an ad for “commercial roofing inspection” and lands on a general roofing homepage with a hero image and a company history blurb.
The landing page should pick up where the ad left off. If the ad promises a free estimate, the page should prominently offer a free estimate. If the ad mentions a specific service, the page should be about that service. Google is evaluating the coherence between what you promised in the ad and what you delivered on the page. So is the visitor. They’ll leave in seconds if the page doesn’t match their expectation, which hurts both your quality score and your conversion rate at the same time.
Page speed deserves a special mention. Google’s data shows that 53% of mobile users abandon a page that takes more than three seconds to load. In many of the industries we work in, like roofing or HVAC or plumbing, the majority of paid traffic comes from mobile devices because people searching for those services are often in a moment of need and they’re on their phones. A slow page is a lead you never got to talk to.
Run your landing pages through Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It’s free and it will tell you exactly what’s slowing the page down. Fix the big items first: oversized images, render-blocking scripts, slow server response times. You don’t have to score 100 to see meaningful improvement in both speed and quality score.
Negative Keywords Are Part of This Too
This one gets overlooked in quality score conversations, but it belongs here. When your ads show for irrelevant searches, your expected CTR suffers because people aren’t clicking on an ad that doesn’t match what they were looking for. And if they do click, they leave fast, which hurts your landing page experience signal.
Negative keywords are how you keep your ads from showing in the wrong situations. If you’re a commercial roofer and you’re showing up for “roofing nail gun for sale” or “how to roof a house yourself,” those queries are pulling down your performance without contributing anything. Adding negatives removes the irrelevant traffic, tightens the pool of searches your ads are competing for, and generally improves relevance across the board.
Look at your search terms report at least weekly. Every search that triggered your ad is in there. Some will be relevant. Some will be a waste. The ones that are a waste go on the negative list. It’s not a one-time setup task. It’s ongoing maintenance, and the accounts that do it consistently outperform the ones that don’t.
The Account History Factor
There’s a component of quality score that doesn’t get its own label but absolutely influences the result: your account’s historical performance. Google has a long memory. An account that has consistently generated strong engagement over time gets some benefit of the doubt on newer keywords. An account that has struggled historically, or one with a lot of paused or low-performing campaigns cluttering up the data, carries that baggage.
This is one reason why starting a new campaign in an established, well-maintained account tends to perform better out of the gate than starting fresh in a new account or a historically messy one. It’s also a reason to actually clean up dormant campaigns and ad groups rather than just pausing them indefinitely and leaving them in place.
You might think of the account like a rental history. A new landlord can see that you’ve always paid on time. Google can see that your ads have historically been relevant and engaging. That history shapes how much trust you get with new campaigns from day one.
What a Good Score Actually Looks Like
A score of seven or above is generally where you want to be for your core keywords. Eight, nine, and ten are achievable and worth pursuing, but the difference in cost between a seven and a ten is smaller than the difference between a four and a seven. If most of your high-spend keywords are in the four to six range, getting them to seven is the highest-priority move.
Not every keyword will reach seven. Some keywords are inherently competitive and hard to build highly relevant ads around. Some landing page issues are tied to the broader website and take time to fix. That’s fine. You’re not trying to perfect every keyword in the account. You’re trying to systematically improve the ones that matter most for your business goals.
It’s also worth knowing that quality score is a diagnostic tool, not the ultimate performance metric. The actual goal is profitable conversions. Quality score improvements should show up as lower cost-per-click and better ad positions, which should translate into more efficient lead generation. If you improve your quality scores but your cost-per-conversion doesn’t move, look at your conversion tracking and your landing page conversion rate. The problem shifted somewhere else.
How Long Does It Take to See Improvement
Not long, if the changes are meaningful. Quality score is recalculated regularly based on recent performance data, so if you rewrite an ad that improves click-through rate, or you speed up a landing page that was loading in five seconds and get it down to two, you can see the score move within a few weeks.
Some components respond faster than others. Ad relevance updates quickly because it’s largely based on the text of the ad, which Google can evaluate right away. Expected CTR and landing page experience take a bit longer because they’re based on actual behavior data, which has to accumulate. Give it at least three to four weeks before drawing conclusions about whether a change worked.
The frustrating truth is that there’s no single change that fixes everything. It’s a combination of better ad structure, tighter keyword groupings, more relevant copy, and faster, more targeted landing pages. Each improvement compounds. The account that has all of those things working together performs significantly better than the account that has nailed just one of them.
When to Ask for Help
Managing quality scores well requires a level of ongoing attention that a lot of business owners don’t have time for. It’s not complicated once you understand the system, but it is continuous. The search terms report needs regular review. The ad copy needs periodic testing. The landing pages need to stay fast and relevant as your services evolve. That’s a real time commitment on top of actually running your business.
If you work with a marketing agency, your account manager should be able to tell you what your key keywords are scoring, which components are underperforming, and what they’re doing about it. If they can’t answer that quickly, it’s worth asking why. Quality score is not an obscure technical detail. It’s a core efficiency metric and anyone running your Google Ads should be watching it.
At Lost & Found Marketing, quality score is one of the first things we look at when auditing a new account. Not because it’s the flashiest metric, but because it’s usually where the most recoverable money is sitting. Accounts that have been running for a year or more with mediocre scores often have structural issues that have been compounding the whole time. Fixing them doesn’t require a bigger budget. It requires better organization and more intentional strategy.
The industries we serve tend to have competitive paid search landscapes, whether that’s roofing in a market with a dozen active advertisers or a healthcare provider going up against large regional systems. In competitive markets, quality score is one of the only places where you can get a real edge without simply outspending everyone else. That makes it worth understanding deeply, not just tracking as a vanity number.
A Few Things Worth Keeping in Mind
Quality score is reported at the keyword level, not at the campaign or account level. When people talk about “improving their quality score,” what they mean is improving the scores on their individual keywords, particularly the ones with the most spend and the most room to grow. There’s no single account-wide score, and Google hasn’t made one, probably because the keyword-level data is actually more useful.
The score you see in the interface is a snapshot. It gets updated, but it reflects a moment in time. If you made a significant change last week and check today, the score may not reflect the full impact yet. Watch trends over several weeks rather than checking daily and expecting immediate movement.
And finally: pausing a low-scoring keyword doesn’t improve your other keywords’ scores. The components are evaluated per keyword. If a keyword is genuinely irrelevant to your business and scoring poorly because of that, pausing or removing it makes sense. But don’t expect that to lift the rest of the account. Each keyword earns its own score based on its own performance data.
The goal with any paid search account is to spend money efficiently and generate real business results. Google Ads quality score is one of the clearest signals the platform gives you about whether your account is set up to do that. A low score is not a punishment. It’s a message. It’s telling you that somewhere in the chain, the keyword, the ad, or the landing page, something isn’t connecting the way it should. Find where the gap is, fix it, and the numbers tend to follow.
If you’re working with a roofing company or any trades or service business and your paid campaigns feel like they’re running but not really performing, quality score is a good place to start looking. Not the only place, but a good one. The inefficiency is usually hiding somewhere in plain sight, in an ad group that’s too broad, a landing page that loads too slowly, or a headline that’s technically fine but doesn’t answer the right question.
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