Does an AdWord campaign affect your rankings?
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Say for instance you are in the business of "lawn mower repair," and you are ranking for that keyword. If you were doing an AdWord campaign on that keyword, would that also affect your organic rankings in the SERPs for that keyword?
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I would say it does but in a indirect way - more traffic = more brand based queries etc and more talk about brand on web etc
Also google sees bounce rates etc which do play a roll
So the short answer in my a opinion is yes but not enough to use it as a seo tactic
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In my experiences there is no direct correlation with ppc and organic. However, i have noticed one indirect benefits of pay-per-click overall. When running a ppc campaign through Google they re-scan your site very often to create your keyword's quality score. Due to this increase in crawling i have found that new content gets indexed faster.
Once again, this is an indirect benefit. In no way does a quick indexation mean a higher rank. it just simply means you turn around on releasing content can be faster.
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I see you are a Guru and with absolute respect to that:
Once I saw an approvement in original rankings. I established a site (one of my early ones) that was hosted on a free server and had not much to do with seo but i ran adwords. The term I was advertising for got only 200 searches a month and it was a Hungarian term, so did not run on Google.com but on .hu. Once I realized that my site appeared to be 6th in the serp. When I turned adwords off a month later it disappeared from the to 60. Maybe it had some other reason for that but I could not discover any reason besides adwords.
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If you were doing an AdWord campaign on that keyword, would that also affect your organic rankings in the SERPs for that keyword?
NO. Absolutely not. Never.
We have been running adwords since it was new.
We run adwords in the same SERPs where we hold top organic rankings.
We have turned the ads off frequently - sometimes seasonally, sometimes when we went out of town, sometimes when we are busy, sometimes when we are low on merchandise, sometimes when we don't want to work as hard... and we also have gotten aggressive for short or long periods. All of that time the organic rankings are unchanged.
There is no tie between adwords and your rankings in the organic SERPs. NONE.
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I examined the above question and read various answers. Some say no. I once experienced effect however just with low traffic keywords. I say if it does not affect your ranking directly it surely does indirectly as it increases the traffic level of your site and as we knoe traffic is a ranking factor. I have also read a book on adwords and it stated that sometimes adwords links are read as original links from a site. That is another opinion but I do doubt that and have not come upon similar issue so far.
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