Does Google AdWords Affect Your SEO?
Google has certainly emerged as the search engine of choice in the past five years or so. Its market share is much higher than search engines like Bing and Yahoo! and some websites that were previously used for search, like AOL.com, have been forced to go in different directions entirely to stay relevant. While AOL still offers a search component, it’s become more of a news source. It’s not surprising. Google has become the king of search. Of course, there always seems to be a conspiracy theory or two surrounding “royalty”. One such conspiracy theory surrounding Google is whether or not there is a correlation between purchasing Google AdWords and ranking well in the search engine.
This debate has gone on for many years, as evidenced by this blog. It highlights an interesting case study in which a website ranked well while running AdWords but then was kicked back to page four when it needed to add some funds to its AdWords account. Within 24 hours of adding funds to the balance, the site was back to the top of page two of the search result. That blog post was written a few years ago, but the debate continues and hasn’t really changed much over the years. Google is still filled with secrets that we will probably never uncover. Everybody has a different opinion on the matter and there are numerous stories like that one that suggest a correlation.
Of course this obviously isn’t the case for every website. No matter how much money is spent on Google AdWords, Google would never rank a website well organically that wasn’t optimized and didn’t have any relevant inbound links. It would also never rank a bad site that provided a poor user experience. However, if all of the factors that make up a good website are there, it’s a possibility that running Google AdWords could affect its organic page rank.
It’s important to note that the correlation between the rank of your website and running Google AdWords is different from the correlation between the organic success of your website and running Google AdWords. The combination of a PPC campaign and an organic campaign can legitimize your website in the eyes of a website user. Essentially your website is showing up on the search engine results page twice when they type in a query, once organically and once in the sponsored section. To many users, this emphasizes that your website is relevant to what they are looking for and they are more likely to click on it.
My instinct is that it’s of course a possibility that there is a correlation between running Google AdWords and the rank of your website but this is something that will never be proven. Therefore, it shouldn’t even be given a second thought. Since it’s not a proven theory I would never incorporate AdWords into a campaign to help SEO for a client. I prefer to spend my time concentrating on the tried and true tactics that work according to the Google webmasters. What do you think? Please share your thoughts and experiences!
8 Responses to “Does Google AdWords Affect Your SEO?”
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Speaking as an Adwords certified individual: No it won’t ever directly affect your SERP ranking directly. It can however affect it indirectly. If a good Adwords campaign drives high-enough traffic volumes to your site to affect Alexa rankings et al, the ranking algorithm can pick up on that and aptly re-factor your score. This indirectly improves your SEO.
though I wouldn’t trust google with my money I cannot think they’d be capable of using dirty tricks like that to rank websites. I was gonna chime in then I read grinch’s comments. people don’t realize how important inbound links are to the ranking algorithm. so if you have been on adwords for quite some time and it quite naturally provide links to your website, with the ensuing traffic, it makes sense that it be factored in your ranking. providing that your adwords campaign is well executed with relevant keywords and landing pages.
Let’s break it down! With Adwords, you should get more hits to your site. You know what keywords work and how expensive they are in your industry. The more you pour into Google,the more they like you.
Even with a small budget, there is no way you can go wrong with the giant that cannot be ignored!
Would Adwords help with relevancy, credibility,legitimacy?
I think maybe so.
Many years ago, experience showed me that Yahoo’s Site Explorer may count content network links as backlinks. They may have been scrubbed on the back-end so link juice may not have been passed along, but their was some evidence.
These were never planned links, it was simply a matter of perfect timing. My ads happened to appear on the page at the time the Yahoo spider came to index that page. I could only find the backlink when I looked at the cached version of the URL in Yahoo.
I do think Google has been smarter at filtering out paid links on the content network from the beginning. But, they should, it’s their system.
Today Adwords PPC ads do not help SEO for Google rankings directly. I don’t care if you drop $200K a month on Adwords, Google is not going reach over to your organic rankings and give them a boost.
The caveat of course is user data. Since Matt Cutts was over-ruled on this being an SEO factor a few months ago – it maybe important. Your CTR, Time on site and bounce rate might be a cumulative factor that includes PPC clicks.
This could then mean your PPC account could hurt or help you!
Hi. I have just noticed the same. The effects are more subtle, whereby the shift is only from #7 to #11, but it seems to happen just before the adwords account runs out. I will add fund tomorrow (5th Oct), so if you would like to check out the position of cleversolar.co.uk against the string ‘solar panels for caravans’ on google.co.uk, you should be able to see this happening.
PS. I promise 100%, I bwill not be changing anything else related to that string or the landing page, etc.
I am 100% convinced that if you don’t subscribe and pay for Google ads your pagerank will go down. As a freelance writer who writes for many online publications, I can say without a doubt that those that pay for Google get a higher pagerank verses those that do it organically and have better sites.
I have seen site with crap content rate higher than sites that do amazing original content and the only difference being that the crap site purchased from Google.
I agree with Grinch and Kevin P, click through, bounce and time on site will affect your rankings by third party means. I’ve never noticed a site’s organic listing drop after a PPC campaign ends, but logically if Google does use third party systems/sites as ranking factors and site visitors drop, so will your Google listing.
Google are not going to raise a sites organic listing because of an Adwords campaign, this is against their best interests as they would rank higher and not need the Adwords campaign anymore.
With nearly 200 factors involved, sites will naturally rise and fall in Google’s listings, be it by themselves or other sites climbing and falling.
Interesting article. Could be coincidence, but I have a client who ranked well for a variety of search terms although his website was a mess until we redesigned it.
We wondered why all of his search engine rankings had no description and discovered that his host had a default robots.txt file that directed Google to not index anything. We replaced that with a file that told search engines to index everything.
Subsequently, the client stopped his adwords campaign. Within a day or so, all of his search rankings for that he did well for just disappeared.
Could be coincidence, but it seems rather odd to me.