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
-
Website ranking stuck on 2nd page of google. How to bring it in top 10 position??
Hi I am working on a site indianhomeappliances.in that for search terms such as 'best washing machine in india' appears near the top of the 2nd page of Googl for url https://indianhomeappliances.in/best-washing-machine-in-india/ When looking at what is listed on the 1st page for 'best washing machine in india' I would appreciate any advice/guidance on what else could be done to give the site a final push to get on the 1st page of search results. I have made more than 60 backlinks along with sites from competitor analysis via moz for this page Looking at the sites that are on the 1st page I cant understand why many of them are ranking higher than me? Any insight and plan of attack would be most appreciated from any search experts on the forum. My website is 2.5 months old. Many Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pank00770 -
Home Page Disappears From Google - But Rest of Site Still Ranked
As title suggests we are running into a serious issue of the home page disapearing from Google search results whilst the rest of the site still remains. We search for it naturally cannot find a trace, then use a "site:" command in Google and still the home page does not come up. We go into web masters and inspect the home page and even Google states that the page is indexable. We then run the "Request Indexing" and the site comes back on Google. This is having a damaging affect and we would like to understand why this issue is happening. Please note this is not happening on just one of our sites but has happened to three which are all located on the same server. One of our brand which has the issue is: www.henweekends.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH_OffLimits0 -
How can I make a list of all URLs indexed by Google?
I started working for this eCommerce site 2 months ago, and my SEO site audit revealed a massive spider trap. The site should have been 3500-ish pages, but Google has over 30K pages in its index. I'm trying to find a effective way of making a list of all URLs indexed by Google. Anyone? (I basically want to build a sitemap with all the indexed spider trap URLs, then set up 301 on those, then ping Google with the "defective" sitemap so they can see what the site really looks like and remove those URLs, shrinking the site back to around 3500 pages)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryggselv.no0 -
Does collapsing content impact Google SEO signals?
Recently I have been promoting custom long form content development for major brand clients. For UX reasons we collapse the content so only 2-3 sentences of the first paragraph are visible. However there is a "read more" link that expands the entire content piece.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB
I have believed that the searchbots would have no problem crawling, indexing and applying a positive SEO signal for this content. However I'm starting to wonder. Is there any evidence that the Google search algorithm could possible discount or even ignore collapsed content?1 -
Would changing the file name of an image (not the alt attribute) have an effect of on seo / ranking of that image and thus the site?
Would changing the file name of image, not the alt attribute nor the image itself (so it would be exactly the same but just a name change) have any effect on : a) A sites seo ranking b) the individual images seo ranking (although i guess if b) would be true it would have an effect on a) although potentially small.) This is the sort of change i would be thinking of making :  changed to 
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam-P0 -
My website (non-adult) is not appearing in Google search results when i have safe search settings on. How can i fix this?
Hi, I have this issue where my website does not appear in Google search results when i have the safe search settings on. If i turn the safe search settings off, my site appears no problem. I'm guessing Google is categorizing my website as adult, which it definitely is not. Has anyone had this issue before? Or does anyone know how to resolve this issue? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CupidTeam0 -
Why am I not ranking in Google, but I am in Yahoo and Bing?
The website in question is: www.stbarthexclusives.com Our keywords are currently ranking for both Bing and Yahoo, but we're not appearing anywhere on Google. The website is being crawled successfully, but we still don't have any results. I hoping somebody can point me in the general right direction to fix/correct this problem. Additionally, there's a decent amount of "rel=canonical tags" on the website. If that helps your evaluation. Any advice would be greatly appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Endora0 -
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