Does PPC affect SEO Traffic?

[AAttias]

Last week my website (www.cooke.co.uk) started PPC advertising with Google. This has been successful in increasing the amount of overall traffic to the site.

However, since we started the PPC advertising, our traffic from organic search has decreased significantly. Our rankings haven't changed dramatically enough to warrant such a decrease.

Has anyone else been in a situation where organic traffic has dropped as a result of launching a paid campaign? What did you do to rectify it?

Thanks.

[Devanur-Rafi]

Oh yes, the short answer would be, No as others posted here.

Here is an interesting discussion about this topic from Moz Q&A forum:

http://moz.com/community/q/how-google-adwords-can-impact-seo-ranking

And an interesting post on YouMoz blog:

http://moz.com/ugc/8-ways-ppc-and-seo-are-better-when-used-together

[YNWA]

I'd say Dean has it pretty much spot on.

[DeanAndrews]

Short answer is technically no. However if you are using keywords in your campaign that you already rank well for in the organic results then this may have and effect of moving visitors that you many have gained naturally to paid visitors.

AdWords can be a great tool to evaluating keywords (and weeding out negative ones). So unless I want to dominate the results page for a particular keyword then I don't use keywords that I already rank well for in my campaigns.

[AutoEurope]

Hi

Maybe this ppc adds are getting the traffic instead the organic results.

I mean, if your organic results are good and you site is the first positions, could be that the "searchers" are clicking the adds instead of the organic results.