It’s a simple question, really. How do you rise to the top of the pay per click charts? Or, what do you need to do to rank #1?
The easy answer is you have to the bid the highest, but there’s a little more to it than that. You can have the highest bid and still not be on the top of the pay per click ad pile. Let’s say, for instance, that you sell widgets and that your ad is clearly optimized for “widget”. But you bid as high as you can for the keyword “gadget”. Do you think you’ll rank #1 for “gadget”? Not likely.
The reason is simple. Google’s Quality Score. If you don’t meet the standard, it doesn’t matter how much you bid. You won’t get where you want to go. Other search engines do it a little differently, but many of them do look at your ad quality.
So the answer to how do you rise to the top of the PPC pile, you have to bid the highest and have a very good quality score. You don’t necessarily need the highest quality score, but you do need a good quality score. But is the #1 position where you need to be? Now that’s a different story altogether.