Oct 29
Q and A: Can running a PPC Campaign affect my Organic Rankings?
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Dear Kalena…
I was wondering if you have an active ppc program if this hurts you in natural search optimization since your paying for keyword placement. Why would Google/Yahoo rank you high if your already paying them lots of money. I tested this by pausing my Yahoo ad for 1 month and sure enough my keywords are all on front page when beforehand they were are pages 3-5. Too nervous to do with Google since we spend a lot per month.
Billy
Hi Billy,
This is a topic which has been much debated over the years, but the short answer is No, running a PPC Campaign will have no “direct” impact on your rankings.
People have speculated that using PPC might improve your rankings (as a reward by the search engine) or – as you’ve have suggested – decrease your rankings (presumably to encourage people to click on the ads).
It should be very easy to test, and many people have tried to prove it one way or the other – but I am unaware of any conclusive proof. Even though your test seems to suggest a correlation between your PPC and organic rankings, you only appear to have done a part of the test. In order to prove the correlation you would need to turn on and off your PPC campaign over an extended period and track this against changes in your rankings.
In my opening sentence above, I emphasized that there is no “direct” effect, because running an aggressive PPC campaign could in fact have an indirect impact on your organic rankings – in a couple of different ways :
- By running PPC you will get extra traffic in a shorter amount of time, and the data that this generates can help you to tweak and improve factors that can influence your organic rankings. For example, through using a broad range of keyword phrases on your campaigns – and by looking at the impressions you get, you will get an idea of which phrases are being searched most often. You should also be able to determine which keywords are converting better. By focusing your optimisation efforts on high volume and higher converting phrases, you will boost your rankings and your sales or enquiries.
- Running PPC will also raise the visibility of your brand and your site. You will be getting extra visitors – and if they like what they see they are likely to link to your site. This in itself will also improve your organic rankings.
Andy Henderson
Ireckon Web Marketing
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February 17th, 2010 at 5:24 pm
I’m not convinced a PPC will have any effect on natural rankings – positive or negative. The apparent results from the Yahoo test could be from any number of reasons – seasonal demand changes, server issues, small sample size, economic forecasts, and probably many others.
I am similarly convinced SEO will improve PPC results (at least in Google). Let me explain.
Google ranks all bidders for a keyword by calculating the bid price by the page value. The top bidders (i.e. with the highest calculated number [bid x value]) will be successful. Any combination of higher bid or better page value will improve the chances of being in the top 10. The actual click price is the minimum price required when multiplied by the page value to still be ahead of the next highest bidder.
Improving page value will provide more clicks for the same daily spend or the same number of clicks can be produced by a lower daily budget.
So how does SEO come into this equation? The page value is based on the same factors that determine the site’s position in organic results – basically relevance of keyword to page theme. Back in SEO 101 I learned to use keywords in title, heading tags, etc; to use keyword rich link text (internal and inbound); not to hide text in images or Flash; and to provide good internal navigation to show Google the theme of my pages. In short SEO techniques improve PPC page value.
February 18th, 2010 at 10:11 am
Thanks Chris,
Yes, using traditional SEO techniques on a PPC landing page may help to improve the Quality Score – which in turn could reduce the Cost per Click and/or improve the rankings of you PPC Ad.
Ensuring that the landing page is relevant to the Keywords and wording of the PPC Ad is likely to have a bigger impact on Quality Score.