What affect do PPC ads (sponsored links) have on SEO results (organic listings)? There are a lot of opinions about the answer to this question.
My two cents worth is that PPC ads have little or no direct affect on SEO results. i.e. Search Engine algorithms don’t reward or punish organic ranking based on the use or non-use of PPC ads. But… there are some interactive benefits.
PPC may help SEO via your site’s popularity score from things like the AdWords Quality Score affect & overall higher traffic site volume, especially with a new website.
And there is evidence that when PPC ads run along side high organic ranked listings for the same company, about the same product or service, that click rates go up and conversions go up. Speculation is that people find you more credible if they see your page showing up in multiple locations on page one of the search engines.
And the keyword data gleaned from PPC ads can be used to improve SEO results. PPC ads can be run for a much broader number and variety of keywords than you can possibly optimize around for SEO. User behavioral feedback about high use keywords in PPC campaigns can be used to fine tune SEO optimization efforts.
What I tell my clients is use both PPC and SEO, especially for new websites or recently revamped sites. PPC will bring immediate lead results and invaluable data about search behavior in your marketplace. As organic results improve over time and lessons learned from PPC are fed back into the SEO efforts, then you can throttle back on PPC ads.
The bottom line is this: If you are generating a return-on-investment with both SEO and PPC ads, then keep going with both until the PPC well runs dry.
Tags: Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, PPC, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Marketing, SEO
