01.31.08
Does PPC Influence Organic SEO?
This is a little debate started on Eric’s blog yesterday which got quite a few people involved. It was quite interesting to see the reactions from various people IMO.
Not a new debate at any rate, but a SEM conspiracy theory going on for a few years now already. I wrote an article around it and a few other conspiracies a couple of years ago as well.
Initially the conversation started from an acquaintance that saw dramatic changes to his key-phrases on organic SEO only after he had activated his Adwords campaign.
SEM is quite subjective. Every search marketer has their own style and way of doing things, and I’ve often thought it incredibly amusing how everyone thinks that their style is better or worse than the next.
SEM is certainly not rocket-science. Anyone can do it, but its the experience (and passion for it) that counts. Knowing how to sift through what works and what doesn’t. Knowing how to combine various techniques to get the best results for the industry in question.
So back to the question at hand. Does PPC influence SEO organic SEO?
The short answer is No.
This was my response in the thread:
1. the PPC algo has evolved to factor in many organic elements as well. What I mean by this is that to run your PPC campaign optimally (as you know), your landing pages’ content need to reflect keywords accurately too and be highly relevant to the ad & keywords you’re bidding on. This brings down click costs and boosts ranking.
2. Now I can’t speak for your acquaintance as I do not know the variables of the situation: how long was his site running before he commenced a PPC campaign, did he make any changes to his content pages? What keywords / key-phrases are we talking about? Is the industry competitive (altho what industry isn’t competitive anymore…) etc etc
So one scenario could be that his site had been running a while, and just so happened that when he ’switched on’ his PPC campaign, the natural organic side kicked-in….
3. AND also because his site was getting more traffic all of a sudden, therefore more interaction and activity on his site - which SEs will pick up, Google ‘naturally assumes’ the site to be more relevant (Quality Score improves), therefore paying more attention to the content, therefore boosting the key-phrases it finds the site to be optimised for on the organic side too..
Andrew Smit pointed everyone to an article on Search Engine Watch which elaborates a little more on the topic, and reminded everyone how Matt Cutts had on several previous occasions denied the allegation.
At the end of the thread, the initial person who posted the question returned a very apt response stating “To be perfectly frank I don’t really care that much as to why it had such a dramatic effect. Happy that it did though…”
Isn’t that what all our clients want to see anyway? Results?.