Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How Google Adwords Can Impact SEO Ranking ?
-
Hi SEO Gurus, I have a question.
How Google Adwords Can Impact SEO Ranking ?
Positive , negative or neutral impact?I will appreciate if you will provide detailed answer
Thank you for your time
webdeal
-
I'm also wondering at the confident boasts in the various responses...
I actually came to this page because I have the same question "How Google Adwords Can Impact SEO Ranking ?" My interest came up as I was looking at the "landing page experience" part of the Quality Score.
The section on Google's support page (https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2404197) seems to imply that Google crawls and checks/indexes the landingpage to score it. I'm wondering if these pages are added to your indexed pages as reported in Webmaster Tools? Is Google taking this page into account for organic results? If the page was already indexed for SEO, does this 'second' scan impact the your SEO performance of the page. Or if the page is for SEA only; how do you prevent it from being indexed for organic results?
-
Google wants there to be a completely fair way to bid on keywords that you are not SEO-perfect for. CPC can be used as a general indicator for competitiveness of the industry, but it's not directly considered when ranking.
-
I'm amazed at the confidence on this post. Why wouldn't Google use quality score on CPC keywords as a factor in organic results for the targeted page? It's real-world input from actual people via click-through rate.
-
The roi value of doing ppc for seo is often not their. Most ppc is sales targeted and that doesnt help seo which is what others where trying to say.
My comment was just saying that at times if you know what your doing it can help seo but its not cheap and often not worth it.
-
Correct
In short - Yes it could help seo but not because google favors ppc - Targeted traffic to quality materia can l= links and shares
-
Dana,
I can understand your point....but David Konigsberg his answer below, says that the Adwords can help....His point is valuable too.
I am confused...
Dmitriy
-
Basically you want to say that the Adwords can be a "tool" for improving link sharing ....
-
I totally agree with you Naina....although I don't practice what I preach,yet. I firmly believe that it is in your own (or your clent's) best interest, for both cost and results, to create completely separate pages for PPC and for organic SEO.
-
AdWords can improve SEO if you are sending traffic to your guides and link bait which gets links and shares
-
I totally agree with you and have seen the same thing myself.
The other positive aspect of running PPC ads is that it increases your exposure (both search and display), and leads to a rise in branded searches. Branded searches, like direct traffic, often convert pretty nicely, and helps to send more signals to Google that you're a brand and should the lovely treatment they often provide to brands. So I do think there are residual benefits to ppc advertising for SEO.
-
I have noticed a very strange thing through my research for around two months. It is that Adwords can harm your normal SEO if you are not playing it intelligent. Let me tell you what I did to find it out.
I took a website and started Adwords campaign with it. Soon I noticed that the main keywords of the campaign did not have good Quality Scores. I tried and tested with multiple Ad Texts, increased the budget, and changed keywords' match cases. It worked as it normally does with Adwords campaign, but did not bring the Quality Score past 5.
I now took the different approach, I started optimizing the landing page. Optimized page load time, images, links and various other things. Brought the page load time to 3 seconds - it was indeed impressive. But, it did not do much with the quality scores, it was around 7 now.
Finally, I started working with landing page keyword placements. Many changes, not frequent, i took at least 4 days to makes changes. Now, I placed keywords in all areas, it was not overly done. But yes, it was more than the usual density. I was aware that it could make the page invite Penguin. But, to my surprise, the quality score on ads lifted up to 9 and even 10 on many keywords. it was great as I was now paying less for each keyword on Adwords. But, you know what! It was caught by Penguin finally. It was to happen, I knew it.
Now see, while an overly optimized page started doing well with Google's Paid search - Adwords, it fell a prey to Penguin in Organic searches.
What I learned? I learned not to use your existing website page as Adwords landing page. Create new ones for Adwords separately.
So to your question, Adwords do not help SEO, rather it harms it.
Thanks
-
BOTTOM LINE: Adwords has NO effect on Ranking.
You can use Adwords to find better converting keywords and THEN target those keywords in SEO.
-
I agree completely with Marie. However, I do think that Google Adwords ads can have a positive impact on how much revenue your good organic rankings produce. In terms of dominating Page 1 results, if you have good organic ranking (say, in the top 5) and you also have excellent paid placement (in the top 3 od paid ads), and you are ranking for images, and you are ranking for videos, and you are ranking in Google shopping....all of this is going to have a collective effect.
If you have that kind of presence, you are bound to gain aggregate value for your organic listings because, if you are marketing well, your traffic will go up, click-through rate will go up and your conversion rate will go up. I firmly believe that if you are improving those things, your rankings will improve also.
That being said, PPC, if it's really well done, can augment your results and could possibly have a residual effect that does benefit your SEO
One other consideration is that any advertising you do, whether it's PPC or print or radio or TV ads, it augments Direct traffic. Direct traffic, in my mind is the golden ticket. Anyone directly typing your URL into their search bar is already your friend. If you can increase your direct traffic pool via PPC, then it's worth every penny.
Hope this is helpful!
Dana
P.S. My statements are based on years of observation. When we've advertised on Google Adwords our visits from organic and direct traffic increased. When we didn't, it decreased....Keep in mind, this was for keywords for which we ranked on the same page for organic and paid results. Sounds like fuel for a future blog post for me!
-
Adwords really don't have any effect on your site's rankings at all. The links that come from the ads are nofollowed.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Brand name not ranking in Google
Hi Moz'ers, Could you help me with something I cannot seem to figure out by myself. In June 2017 my company started a rebranding campaign. We've changed our brand name and launched a new website: https://spotler.com. Everything is going fine, but if you Google our brand name "Spotler" our website doesn't show up. How can it be? Our domain authority is 38. It would be wonderful if you could help me. Let me know if you need more information. Best, Simone
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Spotler0 -
Can a .ly domain rank in the United States?
Hello members. I have a question that I am seeking to confirm whether or not I am on the right track. I am interested in purchasing a .ly domain which is the ccTLD for Libya. The purpose of the .ly domain would be for branding purposes however at the same time I do not want to kill the websites ability to rank in Google.com (United States searches) because of this domain. Google does not consider .ly to be one of those generic ccTLDs like. io, .cc, .co, etc. that can rank and Bitly has also moved away from the .ly extension to a .com extension. Back in 2011 when there was unrest in Lybia, a few well known sites that utilized the .ly extension had their domains confiscated such as Letter.ly, Advers.ly and I think Bitly may have been on that list too however with the unrest behind us it is possible to purchase a .ly so being able to obtain one is not an issue. From what I can tell, I should be able to specify in Google Search Console that the website utilizing the .ly extension is a US based website. I can also do this with Google My Business and I will keep the Whois info public so the whois data can been seen as a US based website. Based on everything I just said do any of you think I will be OK if I were to register and use the .ly domain extension and still be able to rank in Google.com (US Searches). Confirmation would help me sleep better. Thanks in advance everyone and have a great day!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joemaresca0 -
Does having multiple Domain aliases hurt SEO rank ?
Our company having multiple domain aliases (DIfferent TLD) like example.com, .net, .org, .club, .win to one site (Same Content). We do this because our country ISP is blocking a few of the domain aliases. Question: Does this hurt the SEO rank? What approach is the best for us to gain SEO Rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | missionunpossible0 -
Why is Google ranking irrelevant / not preferred pages for keywords?
Over the past few months we have been chipping away at duplicate content issues. We know this is our biggest issue and is working against us. However, it is due to this client also owning the competitor site. Therefore, product merchandise and top level categories are highly similar, including a shared server. Our rank is suffering major for this, which we understand. However, as we make changes, and I track and perform test searches, the pages that Google ranks for keywords never seems to match or make sense, at all. For example, I search for "solid scrub tops" and it ranks the "print scrub tops" category. Or the "Men Clearance" page is ranking for keyword "Women Scrub Pants". Or, I will search for a specific brand, and it ranks a completely different brand. Has anyone else seen this behavior with duplicate content issues? Or is it an issue with some other penalty? At this point, our only option is to test something and see what impact it has, but it is difficult to do when keywords do not align with content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lunavista-comm0 -
Google Ranking Generally in Germany - Keywords & Umlauts
Hi Mozzers, I was hoping i could get some advice/opinions on a website ranking problem i have been working on, in particular one of the pages. This is our German language website which is hosted from Germany and a flaunt German speaking member of staff from our German office moderates the text content of the website for us.Our website seems to get good traffic ,visitor navigation and conversions. One of the keywords i focus building around is Schallpegelmessgerät which is one way of basically saying Sound level meter in German. The keyword uses an umlaut which i cannot use in the URL, but google is picking up and putting into the snippets, but apart from that our on-page optimization is good according to the moz tool. I have been trying to improve our content and we post many blog articles around the topic/keyword but google.de seems to choose not to even display this on the first couple of pages and sometimes ranks our blog articles around the third page. We are even been outranked by some low quality cheap online shop websites some of which with low quality content and low page and domain authorities. I had accepted this but after looking at bing.de and doing a search i find our page in the top 5 results, i understand that google and bing's algorhythms are different but just struggling to get my head around it all. Here is our website & page - http://www.cirrusresearch.de/produkte/schallpegelmessgerat/ Any advice on this situation would be greatly appreciated, thank you very much for reading this James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Antony_Towle0 -
Can Google read my backlink in Javascript??
Hi SeoMoz community! I have a software product, which our clients implement onto their websites. It is like a pop up box. I know that backlinks are very important for SEO ranking, and I really want to give our clients 2 options of product: 1. you can get the free/cheaper option if you use the code which has a keyworded backlink to our site on it 2. you can pay small fee if you don't want to use the version with a link to our site on it Now, the problem is that the product is written entirely in Javascript, and I don't think that Google crawls this, do they? Is there a way around this? Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | qdigi0 -
Can Affiliate Links Harm Your Rank?
Does Google interpret Affiliate links as paid links? If so, can Affiliate links harm your rank if they are not properly tagged with a no-follow? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
Will using a service such as Akamai impact on rankings?
Howdy 🙂 My client has a .com site they are looking at hosting via Akamai - they have offices in various locations, e.g UK, US, AU, RU & in some Asian countries. If they used Akamai, would the best approach be to set up seperate sites per country: .co.uk .com .com.au .ru .sg etc Although my understanding is that Googlebot is located in the US so if it crawled any of those sites it would always get a US IP address? So is the answer perhaps to go with Akamai for the .com only which should target the US market and use different / seperate C class hosts for the others? Thanks! Woj
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wojkwasi0