Google Adwords is one of the most popular medium for internet marketing. You can use Adwords to market in three distinct areas of internet marketing: the search engine pages, Google search partners and in websites supporting Google Adsense (display networks). Among the three, the search engine is probably one of the most coveted marketing strategies adopted by almost all of the advertisers.

The top position in Google Adwords, actually in the search engine result pages usually refers to one of the three positions at the top of the page above the organic search results itself.

In Google Adwords, your ads in search engine result pages can appear in any of three locations: top, side or bottom. Being on the first page of search results page is in itself pretty good and will provide you with plenty of exposure, but being higher up in the position is also quite important.  Ad location at the top of the page is considered to be the prime location, as they get more clicks and a higher click thru rate (CTR).

The biggest factor that affects your ad position is the competition. The more the number of advertisers there are vying for the keyword, the harder it gets to show up consistently at top positions. The next most important factor is the Quality Score for the keywords.

The position of your ad is determined by what is known as Ad Rank. The Ad Rank for each search query, keyword and ad is calculated by using the bid amount and the quality score. There are several different things that can be optimized in order to get a better ad position. We will look at some of the ways you can work towards a better position for your ads.

Keyword Refinement

Getting more traffic is important, but restricting it to more relevant traffic is even more important and better for your marketing investment. Refining your keywords will help to target your marketing to more relevant target audience. Refining the keywords can be any of the following actions:

• Updating or modifying keywords to better target the users, while also deleting the keywords that does not have a huge return on investment. Keywords should very closely match the ads as well as the landing page.
• Using longer keywords or key phrases that better match the potential search query than using single word keywords that generate a lot of (often useless) impressions.
• Using exact or phrase matches instead of broad matches for your keywords. The keywords can now match better to a search query and increase the relevancy and the Quality score.

Many times it is easier and cheaper to rank higher for a long tail keyword (or keyphrase) than it is for a popular single word keyword.

Improving the Quality Score

Improving the quality score is not an easy or quick process. It is directly dependent on many other factors such as the relevance of the ad to the keyword, relevance of the landing page to the ad and keyword, the CTR of the ad for a keyword etc. You will need to work on each of these factors independently to achieve a good quality score over a period of time.

Creating New Ads

Always create newer ads that can be better than the previous high performing ad. You can also delete the poorly performing ads so as to keep it manageable.  I always keep a set of three ads for each and every ad group, which is refined every few months by swapping out the lowest performing ad for a newer one.

Bid Higher

If your budget allows for it, then you can always bid higher than your competition to get top position in Google Adwords. This is definitely one way to compete with other advertisers who may happen to have better quality score. But remember than having a better quality score will actually allow you to spend less and should thus be considered a better option.

The process of achieving top position in Google Adwords is a process that takes both time and effort. Even when you get to the top positions, it is harder to stay there depending on the competition for your keywords. It is always a never ending process that involves performing each of the above tasks on a regular basis.