Quay wall failures are mainly attributed to the properties of backfill soil and foundation soil. From the research available in the field of earthquake geotechnical engineering, it is evident that the failure of quay walls during Niigata earthquake of 1964, Bhuj Earthquake of 2001, Sumatra earthquake of 2004 and The Great Tohoku earthquake of 2011 are caused due to the failure of foundation soil and/or backfill soil. It has been observed that the improvement in the ground conditions leads to lesser deformation of seismic structures. It therefore becomes essential to strengthen the backfill soil and the foundation soil by suitable improvement methods and mitigate such catastrophic failures. The problem of liquefaction and associated deformation of backfill and foundation soil can be controlled by various ground improvement techniques such as densification of soil, providing drainage at suitable locations, dewatering, and introducing reinforcements (Kramer and Holtz, National Science Foundation, 1991). As an attempt to achieve improved performance, a detailed study is carried out on the effect of ground improvement adopting reinforced earth technique on backfill soil and foundation soil of quay wall systems. For this purpose, GEOSTUDIO, a finite element software has been used. An analytical model is prepared to represent a quay wall system comprising of the wall, the backfill soil and foundation soil and analyzed in 2D plane strain idealization. The influence of ground improvement on the permanent horizontal displacement, vertical settlement and amount of tilting of quay wall subjected to strong ground motion is studied. A comparative study is also made on the influence of strength and stiffness characteristics of foundation soil and backfill soil on the seismic displacement of the quay wall which will contribute towards performance-based design of seismic structures such as quay walls.