Does using PPC advertising help your natural SEO rankings?
02/04/2009
Does using PPC advertising help your natural SEO rankings?
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Officially the answer given by Google is No.
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But research by Cornish suggests that PPC advertising can significantly help natural SEO.
When Cornish WebServices provide a total search marketing service to a business we often use PPC advertising in two different ways. The majority of PPC spend is used to increase sales directly via PPC and these campaigns are optimised for ROI from the sponsored search results. But we may also run a second small PPC campaign with the aim of increasing natural search engine optimisation results.
The results of SEO (search engine optimisation) monitoring for many different websites in different markets show the success of this technique.
For some clients Cornish WebServices factor in both sales value from PPC and natural SEO benefit when optimising PPC campaigns, using a mixture of bid management tools and rules based bidding strategies. Given that Google do not officially recognise the possibility that PPC advertising can impact natural SEO this type of approach currently requires data analysis using different systems cannot be done via one ‘on the shelf bid optimiser package’.
The other issue to consider here is timescales. Most PPC optimisation is fast and short term, as PPC advertising is very responsive to changes in bidding. Even bid optimisation which consider historical clicks (ie giving a percentage of sales value to initial click, subsequent clicks and final click which generates a sales) usually operate best over days – weeks at most. By contrast the strategic impact of PPC on SEO occurs over timescales of weeks- months.
