How to Improve Your Google Ads Quality Score: A Step-by-Step Guide

Quality Score is one of the most misunderstood metrics in Google Ads. Advertisers either obsess over it as a vanity number or ignore it entirely, assuming it's out of their hands. Neither approach is right.

Here's what Quality Score actually is: a 1–10 diagnostic score Google assigns at the keyword level, based on three components: expected clickthrough rate (CTR), ad relevance, and landing page experience. It's not a direct ranking factor in the auction. Ad Rank is what determines where your ad shows and how much you pay per click. But the components that feed into Quality Score also feed directly into Ad Rank, which means improving them has real consequences for your costs and positions.

A higher Quality Score generally means you're paying less per click for the same position. A lower one means you're being outbid by competitors who've done the work to align their ads and landing pages with what users actually want. The gap compounds over time.

The good news is that all three components are within your control. Expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience are all things you can diagnose, fix, and improve with specific actions. This guide walks through five steps to do exactly that.

One important framing note before you start: Google's own documentation describes Quality Score as a diagnostic tool, not a KPI to chase in isolation. The goal isn't to hit a score of 10 on every keyword. The goal is to identify which component is dragging a keyword's performance down and fix the underlying issue. The score improvement follows the work, not the other way around.

Work through these steps in order. Make changes, then give Google two to four weeks to gather new data before evaluating impact. Quality Score updates as impressions accumulate, not instantly after you make edits.

Step 1: Diagnose Your Current Quality Score by Component

Before you can fix anything, you need to know exactly where the problems are. Quality Score is assigned at the keyword level, not the ad group or campaign level, so you need to diagnose at the right granularity.

Start by navigating to the Keywords tab in your Google Ads account. By default, Quality Score columns aren't shown. You'll need to add them manually. Click the columns icon, go to "Modify columns," then look under "Quality Score." Add the following four columns: Quality Score, Expected CTR status, Ad Relevance status, and Landing Page Experience status.

Once those columns are visible, each keyword will show a score from 1–10 alongside a status rating for each component: "Above average," "Average," or "Below average." These three labels are your diagnostic signal. They tell you precisely which component is underperforming for each keyword, which is far more useful than the composite score alone.

Now sort your keywords to find the worst offenders. Filter or sort by "Below average" on each component column separately. The keywords that matter most to fix first are those with high spend, high impressions, or both. A keyword with a low Quality Score that barely runs isn't urgent. A keyword spending a meaningful portion of your budget with "Below average" landing page experience is costing you real money every day.

Build a simple working list as you go through this. Group your problem keywords into three buckets: those with low expected CTR, those with low ad relevance, and those with poor landing page experience. Some keywords may appear in more than one bucket, which means they need attention across multiple fronts.

A few things to keep in mind as you do this. Newly added keywords may show "--" instead of a score until Google has gathered enough impression data to evaluate them. That's normal. Don't try to optimize keywords that haven't had enough traffic to generate a meaningful signal yet. Focus on established keywords that have been running long enough to show a status rating.

Also, be aware that Quality Score reflects historical performance data. If a keyword has a long history of poor CTR, it may take sustained improvement before the score moves. That's not a reason to avoid the work. It's a reason to start early.

Success indicator: You have a clear list of keywords segmented by which component is dragging their score down, prioritized by spend or impression volume.

Step 2: Restructure Ad Groups to Lift Ad Relevance

Ad relevance measures how closely your ad copy matches the intent behind a keyword. When this component shows "Below average," it almost always points to the same root cause: your ad groups are too broad, and your ads are trying to serve too many different intents at once.

Think about what happens when you put "task management tool," "team collaboration software," and "project tracking app" into the same ad group. To write one ad that covers all three, you end up with something generic that doesn't speak directly to any of them. Google recognizes this. A user searching for "team collaboration software" sees an ad that feels like it could be for anything, and the relevance signal suffers accordingly.

The fix is to break large, mixed-intent ad groups into tighter, single-theme groups. Each ad group should contain keywords that share the same core intent and can be served by the same ad copy without it feeling vague or stretched. Some advertisers call these SKAGs (single keyword ad groups), though tightly themed groups with two to five closely related keywords often work just as well without creating an unwieldy account structure.

The process looks like this. Take your list of keywords with "Below average" ad relevance. Group them by the specific intent they represent: by product type, by feature, by audience problem, or by how a user would phrase what they're looking for. Keywords that share the same intent belong together. Keywords that represent different needs belong in separate groups.

Once you've restructured the groups, rewrite the ads for each one. The headline in your responsive search ad (RSA) should directly mirror the keyword's intent. Include the keyword or a close variant in at least one headline, ideally in the first headline position. This isn't about stuffing a keyword into ad copy for its own sake. It's about signaling to Google and to the user that your ad is genuinely about what they searched for.

If you're working through a legacy account with dozens of bloated ad groups, identifying which keywords belong together can be time-consuming. Keywordme's keyword clustering feature can help here by surfacing natural groupings from your existing keywords and search terms, which makes restructuring faster and more systematic than doing it manually in a spreadsheet.

Restructuring takes effort upfront, but it pays off across multiple Quality Score components. Tighter ad groups improve ad relevance directly, and they also set the foundation for better CTR because your ads become more specific and more compelling to the right users.

Success indicator: Ad Relevance status moves from "Below average" to "Average" or "Above average" within a few weeks of restructuring and rewriting ad copy.

Step 3: Sharpen Ad Copy to Improve Expected CTR

Expected CTR is Google's prediction of how likely your ad is to be clicked when shown for a given keyword, compared to other ads targeting the same keyword. It's based on historical CTR data, adjusted for factors like ad position. A "Below average" rating here means your ad isn't compelling enough relative to what competitors are showing, or it's showing for search terms that don't match the ad well enough to earn a click.

There are two distinct problems that can cause low expected CTR, and it's worth separating them before deciding how to respond.

The first is a copy problem: your ad isn't doing enough to earn the click even when it's shown to the right person. The second is a targeting problem: your ad is being shown to people whose search terms don't match your ad well, generating impressions without clicks. Both drag down your expected CTR signal, but they require different fixes.

For the copy problem, start with your headlines. In responsive search ads, the headline shown in position one has the most influence on CTR. Pin your strongest, most intent-matched headline to position one so it always appears. Write headlines that reflect specific benefits rather than generic claims. Concrete details, where accurate, tend to outperform vague language. A call to action that tells the user what to do next is more effective than one that's implied.

Google Ads provides an ad strength rating for RSAs, which is a useful proxy for whether you've given Google enough headline and description variety to test. Aim for "Good" or "Excellent" ad strength, but don't sacrifice accuracy or relevance to hit that rating. An ad that's technically "Excellent" but uses generic copy that doesn't match the keyword intent won't improve your expected CTR. Relevance to the specific keyword beats completeness of ad assets.

For the targeting problem, the fix is negative keywords. When your ads show for search terms that have nothing to do with what you offer, those impressions generate no clicks. That pattern of impressions without clicks is exactly what depresses expected CTR. Cleaning up irrelevant search terms from your account is one of the most direct ways to protect and improve this component, and it's covered in detail in Step 5.

Keywordme is built specifically for this part of the workflow. Removing junk search terms and adding them as negatives directly from the Search Terms Report, without exporting to a spreadsheet or switching tabs, keeps irrelevant impressions out of your data and improves the quality of the CTR signal Google uses to evaluate your keywords.

Success indicator: Expected CTR status improves in the Quality Score columns, and you see measurable CTR increases in your campaign performance data over the following weeks.

Step 4: Align Landing Pages with Keyword Intent

Landing page experience reflects how relevant, transparent, and easy to navigate your landing page is for someone who clicked your ad. Google evaluates whether the page content matches what the ad promised, how the page performs on mobile, how quickly it loads, and whether it's clear about who you are and what you're offering.

A "Below average" rating here is often the most impactful Quality Score problem to fix because it affects not just Quality Score but actual conversion rates. A landing page that doesn't match the user's expectation loses the click and the potential customer.

Start by visiting the destination URL for each keyword rated "Below average" on landing page experience. Put yourself in the position of someone who just searched for that keyword and clicked the ad. Does the page directly answer what the keyword suggests they were looking for? Is the information they need visible without scrolling extensively or navigating away? Does the page feel like it was built for this specific user, or does it feel like a generic homepage they've been dumped onto?

Sending traffic from multiple distinct ad groups to the same homepage is one of the most common causes of poor landing page experience scores. A homepage is designed to introduce your brand broadly. A user searching for a specific product, feature, or solution needs a page that speaks to that specific intent. If your ad groups are now tighter after Step 2, the natural next step is to match each tighter ad group to a more specific landing page.

Common fixes include sending traffic to a product or feature page instead of the homepage, adding content that directly addresses the keyword's intent, improving mobile usability, and reducing page load time. On the content side, the goal is genuine relevance, not keyword density. Google evaluates whether the page is useful and transparent for the user, not whether the keyword appears a certain number of times in the body copy. Stuffing keywords into landing page text is not a fix and can work against you.

Page speed is a legitimate signal in landing page experience. Use Google's PageSpeed Insights, which is a free tool, to identify technical issues slowing your page down. Common culprits include unoptimized images, render-blocking scripts, and excessive third-party code. Address the issues flagged there, prioritizing mobile performance since a significant share of search traffic comes from mobile devices.

Success indicator: Landing Page Experience status improves from "Below average." As a secondary signal, you may also see improvements in bounce rate and time-on-page as the page becomes more relevant to the users arriving on it.

Step 5: Review Search Terms Weekly and Add Negatives Consistently

This step ties everything together. Irrelevant search terms don't just waste budget. They actively damage all three Quality Score components at once. They lower expected CTR because your ad gets impressions without clicks. They hurt ad relevance because your ad copy doesn't match what the user typed. And they harm landing page experience because a user who searched for something unrelated to your offer will bounce quickly when they land on your page.

Negative keyword management is the ongoing maintenance work that keeps your Quality Score components clean after you've done the structural fixes in the earlier steps.

Review your Search Terms Report at minimum once a week for active campaigns. The Search Terms Report shows you the actual queries users typed that triggered your ads. This is different from the keywords you added to your ad groups. Keywords are what you bid on. Search terms are what users actually search. The gap between the two is where wasted spend and Quality Score damage live.

As you review, look for search terms that have no relevance to your offer, wrong intent (informational queries when you're selling a product, for example), or audiences that clearly aren't yours. Add these as negative keywords at the appropriate level. Use campaign-level negatives for terms you never want to show for across the entire campaign. Use ad group-level negatives for terms that are irrelevant to a specific group but might be valid elsewhere in the account.

Match types affect how much of this work you'll need to do. Broad match keywords attract the widest range of search terms and require the most active negative keyword management. Phrase and exact match keywords are more controlled but still benefit from regular search term reviews, particularly as Google's matching behavior evolves. Understanding how match types affect which search terms trigger your ads is important context for this step.

If you're launching a new campaign, build a proactive negative keyword list before it goes live. Common irrelevant modifiers like "free," "DIY," "jobs," "salary," "how to" (if you sell a product rather than educational content), and competitor brand names you don't want to appear for can be added upfront, before those terms generate wasted impressions and drag down your Quality Score signals from day one.

For advertisers managing multiple accounts or high-volume campaigns, the manual process of reviewing search terms, identifying junk, and adding negatives can consume significant time each week. Keywordme is built specifically for this workflow. It lets you remove irrelevant search terms and add them as negatives with a single click directly inside the Google Ads Search Terms Report, without exporting to a spreadsheet or switching to another tool. For agencies managing multiple client accounts, the bulk editing and multi-account support make this process considerably faster than doing it natively in Google Ads.

Success indicator: Impression share from irrelevant queries decreases, CTR improves, and wasted spend drops as your negative keyword lists become more comprehensive over time.

Putting It All Together: Your Quality Score Action Plan

Quality Score improvement isn't a one-time project. It's an ongoing process of tightening structure, sharpening copy, and cutting noise. The five steps above address each component systematically, starting with diagnosis and working through the specific fixes that move the needle.

Here's the quick checklist to work through:

1. Pull the Quality Score component columns in the Keywords tab and identify your "Below average" keywords by component, prioritized by spend or impressions.

2. Restructure broad ad groups into tighter, single-theme groups and rewrite ad copy so headlines directly mirror each group's keyword intent.

3. Refine RSA headlines to match keyword intent, pin your strongest headline to position one, and eliminate irrelevant search terms that are dragging down CTR signals.

4. Audit landing pages for keywords with poor landing page experience scores. Match page content to what the ad promises and use PageSpeed Insights to address technical performance issues.

5. Review the Search Terms Report weekly, add negatives consistently at the right level, and build proactive negative lists before launching new campaigns.

Give each change two to four weeks before evaluating impact. Quality Score updates as Google gathers new data, not immediately after you make edits. Patience here is part of the process.

If you're spending significant time each week on search term reviews and negative keyword management, that part of the workflow can be made considerably faster with the right tool. Start your free 7-day trial of Keywordme and see how much quicker the cleanup goes when you're removing junk search terms, adding negatives, and building keyword lists with one click, directly inside Google Ads. No spreadsheets, no tab switching, just faster optimization where you're already working. After the trial, it's $12 per month per user.