Can Adwords Increase Organic Traffic?
-
Hello,
A friend of mine has noticed an increase in organic traffic since they started using AdWords. Has anyone had similar results or could this be coincidence?
Thanks in advance!
-
What about the CTR of your website? Google says "increased CTR as well as more traffic makes your website increase in authority" - therefore increasing organic ranking of all or most keywords - (Google didn't say that part but it makes sense).
If AdWords provides both of these things to your website wouldn't your organic rankings increase / increase over time?
-
Great answer Patrick you didn't miss a single point.
-
Hi there
I feel it's pretty indirect but there can be benefits. I use paid as it pertains to organic traffic in the following ways:
Brand awareness - If you are looking to capture a particular niche or industry and don't have a well established name or brand, start looking into keywords to bid on that can garner a bit more attention for your brand. This will help users not only see your brand and name, but it will help build the association between you brand and an industry. It's also a great way to introduce your products, the benefits of that product, and why you should not be the best choice, but the only choice in the industry.
Keyword / query testing - If you have a list of keywords/queries that you are looking to target, paid is a great way to test your hunches and see how users engage with your content. Are you answering their question? Are you selling yourself well enough for conversions for particular keywords/queries? What is your Quality Score for keywords/queries your testing? Do you need to improve your content? These questions can help you moving forward with your content creation that helps SEO.
Content distribution - I love using paid search for quick content distribution, especially if it's timely and relevant. It helps get eyes on it quicker and can also help speed up the sharing process, which Google is thought to look into a bit to help gauge what's popular on the web. Again, this is just speculation, but it's been talked about in a few studies.
These are the ways that I see paid indirectly helping with your organic traffic and visibility. It helps build your brand, helps you better gauge your keywords and how your content is converting certain keywords, as well as helps get your content out quicker and efficiently through targeting. While not direct, there are benefits from a paid search standpoint that can help indirectly with organic search.
Let me know if this helps - good luck!
-
In theory, they should have no impact. However, I do think that seeing the ad and then seeing the link in the organic results as well makes a searcher feel more compelled to click. My traffic increase coincided with Adwords budget increase too. I'd been doing some SEO work before though and I'd like to think it was more that. Will be interesting to see how others have got on.
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
-
Negative keywords on AdWords account, but mispelling in customer query still triggers ad. Possible to avoid?
Ok, So this really p*#%d me off the other day. I've built an extremely comprehensive list of Negative keywords for our trade bookbinding pages on Ad words. Amongst 100's of others, I've also included every City, Town, Village, and County in the UK so our Ads don't get triggered by local search intent. However, we're still getting clicks from searches like this one: **'binding services n worcestr' ** Question: If Google won't assume this is a misspelling of one of our Neg KW, how I can I possibly protect the account from this type of search? Is this something we just have to accept having KW's on broad match mod/ phrase match?
Paid Search Marketing | | isaac6631 -
How can I increase quality score when bidding on competitors?
I'm trying to increase my quality score when bidding on competitors. I've broken up each competitor into a separate ad group and focused on 5-10 keywords in each but my quality scores seem to stay around 3 - 5. I'd like them to be more in the neighborhood of 5-7 Currently my ad relevance is below average and feel that if I can increase that to at least average than I should see some better quality scores. Any advice on how to do this with the competition? Normally, I just focus ads around the use of the keywords but since the keywords are brand names, I can't do that with these ads.
Paid Search Marketing | | jarjarjarvis0 -
Importing Analytic goals into Adwords
My company is in the process of updating how we track conversions in Adwords and Analytics. One prgrammer suggested importing Analytic goals into the Adwords account. I am extremely hesitant to do that because I know that Analytics and Adwords don't always play nicely together. Does anyone have any experience (positive or negative) around this. Pros and cons? Should I keep the tracking separate? Also, FYI, our flow does not employ the traditional "thank you page" conversion model. We have java scripts and onload events that fire when goals are triggered. I am not a programmer so I am a little out of the loop on how it all works. All I know is that I want conversions/goals to be attributed to the correct channel. Help me mozzers!
Paid Search Marketing | | Vacatia_SEO0 -
Keyword Traffic - Does this count paid traffic?
I'm looking at keyword rankings, and specifically at the number under "Keyword Traffic" for one of my keywords, which is described as "how many visits this keyword has generated for your website". We run adword campaigns for some of these keywords. I'm wondering if this number is tracking visits from adwords or is this only organic?
Paid Search Marketing | | mboynton0 -
Adwords "Display Network" tab buggy?
Anyone else notice the new Display Network tab in Google Adwords is buggier than a cheap NY motel bed? Everytime I load it in firefox I end up twiddling my thumbs for several minutes before hard closing the program. Very frustrating morning... In case anyone else is feeling this pain, I just tried it in opera and it finally loaded ok.
Paid Search Marketing | | AdoptionHelp0 -
Bad Adwords Leads and B2B Placement Ideas
Hello, I have two PPC related questions that hopefully someone could help with. My client complains that the majority of leads he is getting are disqualified - mainly due to fake contact info left on the landing page. This happens both in the Display and Search campaigns. We are getting a good number of leads and we checked with Google that there is no fraud involved. What can be done about this? Has anyone encountered that kind of complaint and how did you deal with it? Can you recommend any tools, other than Google's Ad Planner to find good placements for a display campaign? Another client of mine is selling B2B services such as document destruction etc. Where can I find, for example, a list of placements frequented by people from the insurance business? I never had a problem finding placements for B2C but B2B seems to be a lot different. Any insight will be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Michal
Paid Search Marketing | | michalseo0 -
Super weird stuff in Adwords!
Sup people, Check this out, I found a keyword from the search query report in Adwords, its had over the last month 120,000 impressions and its long tail ish (4 words). Now when I check the keyword tool it says less then 10, when I check Google insights nothing. So I check if EMD is free and it is, so now im really interested! Speak to Google account manager about it he says yeah its super weird, checks account to make sure its not coming from display network and it isn't, so we add the keyword from search query report as a exact match and let it run, this is the second day, yestarday when we added it it done 4000 impressions, today so far its done 500. Whats the score, does it sound like it is doing the traffic or do you think its some sort of bug in Adwords as other tools (keyword tool, Google insights) dont show the same result. The only thing I can think of is, its just kicked in on Google suggestions but not 100% other then that I don't know.
Paid Search Marketing | | activitysuper0 -
Adwords ban
my client has 2 adwords accounts - one banned in 2009 and one where 9 of 11 ads are suspended - the other 2 ads run and he pays 6k per month for traffic - he still has net60 terms with no limit on ad spend b/c his offer converts so well. he wants to clear his name so we can proceed further without risk of being banned - he is paying me a pretty penny to turn his 4/10 qual scores into 9's and 10's - he will get 2x the traffic at 1/2 the price and i am looking to make a major 6 figure bump to his bottom line this year so he can jstify paying my exhorbitant fee. lol. i am not getting much help from the folks over at the Big G - to be expected - they have suspended 9 of his ads for "artificial ad traffic" - at least that is their reason - any way he is legit - in biz for 12 years online - with 60,000 customers on his list and over 1000 testimonials on his site - my question is is there any way GG will connect the dots in 4 months once i have his adwords campaign fully optimized and running smoothly and say "hey arent you the guy who we suspended twice over the past 2 years???" or are we to be judged simply on what we do from here forward with this new account? i am having his designer create 100 new landing pages to match the 100 unique ads for the 100 exactmatch kw's for the 100 unique ad groups - lotta work - but once its done its 10/10 across the board - with no mention of artificially boosting someone's traffic -- although isnt that what everyone is doing when they buy visits to their sites? this goes on all day long and no o ne seems to care - except GG but my client sells real human traffic not bot generated crap. all love, EZ
Paid Search Marketing | | ezubkov0