AdWords | Inactive Search

[nickCR]

Forum,

This is my first post and i'd like to say that having a Google community is a great thing! I have also tried reading all the different adwords post regarding this topic but nothing has really proven to be relavent exactly to my issue and I have a few specific questions...

Recently in the last 2 weeks i've been getting hit really bad with Inactive Search. Naturally I read all the information I could about what exactly that was. I found several "possible" reasons however it was not until I e-mailed support that I found out my sites were hit for low quality landing pages. At the time I was directing the visitors to my main page where they needed to proceed by clicking a "go" button to proceed to the next step. I changed that to point directly to the subscription page shortly after the e-mail from the adwords support notifying me of the problem.

I still see no changes. I did this change about 3 days ago.

I understand that AdWords is doing their best to keep un-wanted ads out of their paid advertising. I made sure that my keywords were relavent to my site and did not put anything I shouldn't. I have about 60 keywords with different variations. Just to explain what my business is. We are a completely legitamate online/offline subscription company for newspapers in the united states, included in those is the los angeles times and denver post which I will use as examples here. So an example of my keywords is: los angeles times subscription, subscribe to los angeles times and los angeles times, however I have not added los angeles times classifieds or los angeles times sports beause they are not related to my keywords.

The links I use in AdWords are a little tricky but there are reasons for this so please let me explain before I get scholded for being a schmuck..
- The url I use is: http://www.losangelestimessubscription.comack/?v=c10b24
- About 1 month ago I moved all my sites under one url so I could secure the order process
- With the merger I put all the sites in a custom built application to manage my newspapers, offers, orders and affiliates.
- Since I moved all them I used a "301 Permanent Redirect" to the new home of the Los Angeles Times on my site which is:
http://www.ordermypaper.com/losangelestimes/
- The redirect also kept the tracking url so I could track the individual results of all my different campaigns which is very important for me.
- Ability to have affiliates who can drive traffic to my site and earn commissions.

Since these keywords really don't have enormous traffic I needed to expand a little, so I opened up to the los angeles times keyword which provided excellent results. It really increased our business by almost 40% with that one keyword. I know the CTR is lower there but with the low traffic the other words generate I don't have a lot of choices.

I am going to be adding a couple extra things to my sites.

1. FAQ this area will provide our visitors with common answers to their questions because I have received many support mails and by adding this section it would relieve the support mails and receive

2.A contact form but with very specific questions related to online orders only.

3. A link to our master site ordermypaper.com where they would be able to enter their zip code and get results for all the newspapers in their area. The reason we are not doing that here is because we are direct marketing them and want them to land on a targeted site.

I really hope someone can help me with this issue as I have tried to be as torough as possible and it would increadible help me out.

Thank you in advance,

Nick

[PaulMS]

A couple things jump out that are missing:

1) Privacy policyBR2) Terms of service

DMA has a good privacy policy generator here:

http://www.the-dma.org/privacy/priva... /> <br /> TOS is trickier as is very dependent on your site.

NetZero now has http://www.privatephone.com (free local phone numbers in your area code) which you can try for your site if you don't have a second biz line and don't want to give out home number.

[nickCR]

Thank you Paul for your reply. I didn't know that they actually took those two items into consideration and that might actually be the key to the problem because in the last 3 months we hired someone and he did everything I could think of including add pages and content, we even brought all our other sites in under one roof. So that is something I will investigate and build.

My new SEO guy (starting in a week) has already made some suggestions to make the pages better not only for SEO but also for our customers which at the end of the day is what we want.

How can one avoid such problems in future with Google? I ask this because lets say even though our "CTR" is not very good (0.6-1.0%) our actual conversions on our site is excellent with almost 15-20% of our traffic subscribing to the paper. Not really sure what the logic is behind this numbering. I do get that there may be more specific keywords (which we have) but that doesn't mean that there isn't quality traffic in the more broad keywords that we are also looking for.

If anyone else can make suggestions that would help improve my Quality of landing page, I would appreciate it greatly.

Regards,

Nick

[kevgibbo]

The recent landing page quality score update has affected a lot of websites, privacy policy, terms and conditions, copyright statements etc are a good way of giving Google more reason to trust your website.brbrAre you using Google AdSense or affiliate ads on your landing pages or throughout your website?br

[nickCR]

Thank you for your reply, no I have no affiliate or adsense ads on my site at all.

I understand that those things will help but like you say they'll only help, I can't see Google putting tons of weight on those items. It would seem more important to check the content of the site and other details. I'm here for suggestions and help, the items mentioned are something I will add to the site as I feel they are important in any case.

Thanks again!

Nick