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
-
The main navigation is using JS, will this have a negative impact on SEO?
Hi mozzers, We just redesigned our homepage and discovered that our main nav is using JS and when disabling JS, no main nav links was showing up. Is this still considered bad practice for SEO? https://cl.ly/14ccf2509478 thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty19861 -
Can subdomains hurt your primary domain's SEO?
Our primary website https://domain.com has a subdomain https://subDomain.domain.com and on that subdomain we have a jive-hosted community, with a few links to and fro. In GA they are set up as different properties but there are many SEO issues in the jive-hosted site, in which many different people can create content, delete content, comment, etc. There are issues related to how jive structures content, broken links, etc. My question is this: Aside from the SEO issues with the subdomain, can the performance of that subdomain negatively impact the SEO performance and rank of the primary domain? I've heard and read conflicting reports about this and it would be nice to hear from the MOZ community about options to resolve such issues if they exist. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BHeffernan1 -
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 -
Newly designed page ranks in Google but then disappears - at a loss as to why.
Hi all, I wondered if you could help me at all please? We run a site called getinspired365.com (which is not optimised) and in the last 2 weeks have tried to optimise some new pages that we have added. For example, we have optimised this page - http://getinspired365.com/lifes-a-bit-like-mountaineering-never-look-down This page was added to Google's index via webmaster tools. When I then did a search for the full quote it came back 2nd in Google's search. If I did a search for half the quote (Life is a bit like mountaineering) it also ranked 2nd. We had another quote page that we'd optimised that displayed similar behaviour (it ranked 4th). But then for some reason when I now do the search it doesn't rank in the top 100 results. This, despite, an unoptimised "normal" page ranking 4th for a search such as: Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered. So our domain doesn't seem to be penalised as our "normal" pages are ranking. These pages aren't particularly well designed from an SEO standpoint. But our new pages - which are optimised - keep disappearing from Google, despite the fact they still show as indexed. I've rendered the pages and everything appears fine within Google Webmaster Tools. At a bit of a loss as to why they'd drop so significantly? A few pages I could understand but they've all but been removed. Any one seen this before, and any ideas what could be causing the issue? We have a different URL structure for our new pages in that we have the quote appear in the URL. All the content (bar the quote) that you see in the new pages are unique content that we've written ourselves. Could it be that we've over optimised and Google view these pages as spam? Many thanks in advance for all your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWhyley0 -
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 cache is showing my UK homepage site instead of the US homepage and ranking the UK site in US
Hi There, When I check the cache of the US website (www.us.allsaints.com) Google returns the UK website. This is also reflected in the US Google Search Results when the UK site ranks for our brand name instead of the US site. The homepage has hreflang tags only on the homepage and the domains have been pointed correctly to the right territories via Google Webmaster Console.This has happened before in 26th July 2015 and was wondering if any had any idea why this is happening or if any one has experienced the same issueFDGjldR
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adzhass0 -
SEO Impact of High Volume Vertical and Horizontal Internal Linking
Hello Everyone - I maintain a site with over a million distinct pages of content. Each piece of content can be thought of like a node in graph database or an entity. While there is a bit of natural hierarchy, every single entity can be related to one or more other entities. The conceptual structure of the entities like so: Agency - A top level business unit ( ~100 pages/urls) Office - A lower level business unit, part of an Agency ( ~5,000 pages/urls) Person - Someone who works in one or more Offices ( ~80,000 pages/urls) Project - A thing one or more People is managing ( ~750,000 pages/urls) Vendor - A company that is working on one or more Projects ( ~250,000 pages/urls) Category - A descriptive entity, defining one or more Projects ( ~1,000 pages/urls) Each of these six entities has a unique (url) and content. For each page/url, there are internal links to each of the related entity pages. For example, if a user is looking at a Project page/url, there will be an internal link to one or more Agencies, Offices, People, Vendors, and Categories. Also, a Project will have links to similar Projects. This same theory holds true for all other entities as well. People pages link to their related Agencies, Offices, Projects, Vendors, etc, etc. If you start to do the math, there are tons of internal links leading to pages with tons of internal links leading to pages with tons of internal links. While our users enjoy the ability to navigate this world according to these relationships, I am curious if we should force a more strict hierarchy for SEO purposes. Essentially, does it make sense to "nofollow" all of the horizontal internal links for a given entity page/url? For search engine indexing purposes, we have legit sitemaps that give a simple vertical hierarchy...but I am curious if all of this internal linking should be hidden via nofollow...? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jhariani2 -
Domain Forwarding - SEO Impacts?
I have a site that has been active for years - thinkbiglearnsmart.com. Awhile ago I had purchased about 50 domain names that were relevant to my company. I still have those urls and would like to use them to point to different pages on my site - just because they have good key words in the URLs. For example - one is dreamweavertrainingclassesonlinelive.com. Currently they are all redirecting to my homepage. A. is that hurting me? B. I would like to redirect to the more relevant page. ie the page dedicated to Dreamweaver training (http://thinkbiglearnsmart.com/dreamweaver-creative-cloud-training-course/ ) Will this hurt my Dreamweaver keyword for example because there is already a 301 redirect on that page from a very old Dreamweaver link which was something like thinkbiglearnsmart.com/dreamweaver C. On my hosting account where I can select where the URL forwards to - it has an option for "Location forwarding" and "Frame forwarding" - currently they are set to Frame forwarding - which one is best? Any help is much appreciated!!! Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webbmason0