SEO & CPC
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So...I know Google secret sauce is just what secret but on a couple occasions I've seen a Phenomenon occur that I'd like some help understanding. I work at a fairly new eCommerce sit called www.savvisdirect.com. We have the normal new site desires...more traffic. Most of our traffic is coming from CPC but we were seeing about a 33% increase in organic wk over wk, until...we drastically cut our CPC spend on Google for a wk. Then organic dropped by about 1/3'rd. Nothing else changed, that's it. I know Google says that CPC spend doesn't affect rankings but I've seen this phenomenon a couple time @ a couple different sites & I'm getting to the point where I just don't believe it. What's your perspective on this?
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I have seen phenomenon like this before, but believe it could stem from the pausing of the ppc campaigns (I have also seen an increase in organics after a paused campaign for competitive keywords).
Once a ppc campaign is paused, your repeat visitors should drop and your CTR may improve for organic positions. Since some people believe that traffic/ctr are computed in their Algorithm this could shift your rankings.
If Google did do this, I think the FTC or some other agency would be down their throats. However, who knows....
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Another possibility is that you don't have auto-tagging enabled in Adwords. This can cause CPC traffic to be misattributed as Organic traffic in Google Analytics. This recently happened with one of our sites. Make sure you have auto-tagging enabled, and look back at the landing pages for your Organic traffic in GA and make sure they were being attributed properly.
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Most likely it's a coincidence. Google traffic & rankings fluctuate all the time, especially for new sites.
Google does take user experience into account in its rankings, so there could be an off-chance that somehow the decreased CPC traffic had an impact on SEO. The only way to know for sure would be to increase your CPC spend again, and see if SEO traffic increases. Then cut it again, and see if it impacts your search traffic. If you can repeat this a few times, you will have a strong case for causation there.
However, I personally think that it's unlikely.
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