Will PPC affect Organic?

[klmarketing]

Is anyone familiar with a relation between Google PPC and Organic? We started a PPC campaign recently and our organic results spiked up at the same time for phrases that we are bidding on.

[DavidKonigsberg]

1- We have run ppc accounts with 30k monthly spend that have no organic traffic.

2- The backlash that google would get if this where true is too high from a risk/ reward assisment for me to believe it.

3- I do believe ppc helps SEO in some cases but from a content amplification point of view

[SamMaley]

For anybody saying no, PPC does not affect Organic, do you have any proof?

With the way Google are going with (not provided), basically trying to get everyone to use PPC it really would not surprise me if PPC does in fact boost your organic rankings, that would benefit Google as it would encourage more people to use PPC and Google tends to do exactly what will benefit itself.

That being said there are many indirect factors from operating PPC that could increase organic performance, as mentioned by some of the other guys here.

I'd love to see a study which could definitively answer this!

[Branden_S]

Ppc does not effect seo results.  However if you do not tag your ppc destination urls, google analytics will place this traffic in "direct traffic" category.  Make sure that you enable auto tagging in Adwords and in AdCenter you need to make sure to use utm codes in your destination urls or this traffic will be placed in direct traffic category. Also since you will be generating additional traffic, you hopefully will be receiving social shares, so you need to make sure that have are tagging tour social sharing buttons, or this traffic will be lumped into dirafik traffic bucket.

Last month there was a good seomoz blog post on this topic.  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-google-analytics-tagging-matters-whiteboard-friday

[DavidKonigsberg]

No they dont have a direct effect but if you have a great content etc a rise in ppc traffic can cause a rise in shares and links which can cause a rise in organic results. I have clients that do heavy ppc and no seo and have no organic traffic.

[TheeDigital]

We've seen this happen as well.

[klmarketing]

Interesting that you too have seen this.

[klmarketing]

That's what I always thought as well.  But it happened on different days... for different campaigns that went live.  There is a brief spike and then it levels off again.

[UnderRugSwept]

According to Google, no. I will add that every time I start a PPC account and campaign for a site, its organic rankings jump up . . .

No, I'm not a conspiracy theorist . . . really.

[BrianJGomez]

No, there is no direct effect that PPC has on organic. At least that's what Google says. There are some indirect effects of having a PPC campaign that I've seen. For instance on campaigns where our clients already have 1st page placement, their organic CTR increases when their PPC campaign is running. But I would guess that the jump you saw when you did the PPC campaign was coincidental.