Two technical fixes move your Quality Score. Five common ones don't. Here's how to tell which is which — and why your CPC depends on it.
Quality Score · Core Web Vitals · Dynamic Text Replacement
Google's auction has a built-in penalty system. Most advertisers pay it without knowing — and their agency proposes a budget increase to compensate.
Google publishes the formula. Few agencies walk a client through it: Ad Rank = Bid × Quality Score. The multiplication sign is the entire game. A competitor with a great score and a $3 bid will outrank your $9 bid with a poor score. You pay more. You appear lower. You convert less.
The budget isn't the problem. The Quality Score is. And only two technical levers actually move it.
See the two levers
Three components: Expected CTR, Ad Relevance, Landing Page Experience. Google has documented the inputs to each. Two of them respond to landing page work.
Page speed feeds Landing Page Experience directly. The data comes from real Chrome users worldwide. There is no shortcut. We engineer to a specific bar: a mid-tier Android phone, 4G, rural area. That's where a meaningful share of your prospects search from — not your developer's M3 MacBook.
We hold LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1, with edge rendering for accounts spending over $20K/month. Result: a Landing Page Experience grade that holds at "Above Average" and lowers CPC at every keyword level.
Ad Relevance scores how well the page matches the triggering keyword. Google evaluates this with a literal text-match analysis. Someone searching "Miami maritime injury lawyer" who lands on "we handle personal injury cases" sees a mismatch. So does the auction.
Edge logic rewrites the headline, subhead, city, and proof points to mirror the query. One template feeds dozens of ad-group variants — single canonical URL, no client-side flash, no SEO penalty. That's the entire short list. If an agency pitches you twenty Quality Score tactics, they're either misinformed or hoping you don't audit the claim.
Five tactics most agencies sell as Quality Score work. None of them are. They move other metrics — sometimes valuable ones.
We do them. We just won't lie about what they do.
Tap-to-call buttons, badges, friction removal. Google does not see your bounce rate. They do see post-click pogo-sticking on their own surfaces — that's real. The rest is conversion work. Moves: conversion rate.
Wins rich results in organic search. Unlocks reusable assets for ad extensions. Not a Quality Score input. The branded search lift pays for the work. Moves: SERP visibility.
A 4.9-star profile next to your paid ad lifts the ad's CTR. Real money. Not a documented Quality Score factor — but worth doing on the math alone. Moves: ad CTR (indirect).
Organic moat. Not a paid auction lever. But firms with deep organic presence pay less for paid clicks because brand search rises. Moves: organic moat.
Worth doing for organic CTR. Not the same as Expected CTR in your ad account. We'll do it. We'll report it against the metric it moves. Moves: organic CTR.
Expected CTR is the third Quality Score component. It lives inside the ad account, not on the landing page. It's the one most agencies pretend doesn't exist.
Tight ad group structure. Strong RSA asset variety. Disciplined negative keyword hygiene. Query-level intent matching. None of it photographs well in a pitch deck. Moving Expected CTR requires logging into the account every week — not selling a one-time landing page redesign and disappearing.
No landing page tactic substitutes for this. The fastest page in your vertical drags down with a poorly-run account. We do this work because skipping it is malpractice.
Sequenced by what each tactic moves. Reported the same way.
Month 1: Core Web Vitals and DTR rollout. Component grades move on the first monthly report. Months 2–3: Trust signals, GBP, schema, ad-extension build. Reported against CVR and CPA.
Months 4–12: Content and link work. The moat. Reported against organic impressions and rankings. Quality Score grades come from your Google Ads account, with screenshots. No tactic gets credit for a metric it didn't move.
Quality Score is an invisible number that decides what you pay and where you appear. The audit makes it visible — component by component, keyword by keyword. What you do with that is up to you.
We won't promise you the #1 spot. We won't bid against ourselves. We won't sell you a faster server when what you need is a different message. We fix the actual problem — even when it's smaller, and especially when it's bigger, than you expected.