Although there is some commonality with keyword research, until recently PPC campaign management and search engine optimisation required different skills and approaches to search engine marketing.

Recently, however, Google introduced a quality score into its Adwords system.  This score assesses your keywords, ads and landing pages with a rating of either “poor”, “OK”, or “Great” and is designed to improve relevance to the searcher.  Keywords with low quality scores cost more and those with high quality scores rank better – so there is a real incentive to spend some time on your campaign and improve these ratings.

Interestingly, one of the main aspects of improving your quality score is to use search engine optimisation skills.  Your ads and your landing pages are now assessed for relevance to your keyword – and so PPC Campaign Managers are looking to their SEO colleagues for assistance and advice on ensuring that their landing pages have strong titles, decent keyword density, H1 tags, and many of the other “on page” optimisation techniques that have been used for years in SEO.