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Pay-Per-Click can actually help SEO

Aug 29, 2008 Landing Pages, SEO, Webmaster Tips

Many of us already know, the labor and attention SEO demands can be tough to justify in an organization, especially when advertising budgets for pay-per-click are available and bring instantaneous results.  Many online marketers already make a point to implement site-wide changes with conversion uplifting tricks gleaned from PPC campaigns to other sections or public-facing areas of a site.  What isn’t readily known is whether PPC campaigns can actually help your natural rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs), until now.

In every search marketers day, there are bound to be times when the inevitable explanation has to be repeated, the difference between SEO and PPC.  I think the dust has finally settled and the consensus has finally been reached about the nomenclature of various elements of search engine marketing (SEM) as a whole.  SEO or life in the SERPs is purely organic and there is little you can do to guarantee certain results because the engines call the shots, and PPC is any sponsored search program allowing you to take over and select keywords you want to target.  Many search engines have flat-out said, no matter how much sponsored search advertising a company does, it will not affect your organic results.  So, the two never really mix, or do they?

Recent evidence in my own campaigns has shown that ranking in sponsored search results can help the clickthrough rate of your organic SERPs listings.  Although the results are still inconclusive, it appears more people are drawn to the organic results and actually click through on them when a similar message, or even when your company’s URL shows up in the sponsored search results.

However, there is one major caveat to this conclusion.  The only time consistent results were measured is when the organic SERPs positioned the company’s page on the front page, and the company bid high enough in a PPC campaign to show up on the same front page.  Another minor caveat is geotargeting.  Search engines deduce geotargeting favorites based on algorithms controlling their SERPs, whereas advertisers control their geotargets within a search engine’s advertising interface.

There is a silver lining though and the good news is that if you haven’t tested a branding campaign targeted to your own brand name or trademarks, you may be in for a positive surprise.  Brand awareness and confidence seems to increase, as significant increases in conversion can be observed across most advertiser’s accounts.  I can’t guarantee you see the same results, but this also has a positive impact on SEO.

The more people inclined to click on natural rankings after gaining confidence in a company by (consciously or subconciously) recognizing the same company in the sponsored search results, theoretically the higher your natural search ranking will climb.  Although there is undoubetely a “secret sauce” that search engines don’t want anyone to know, but one element of quality score and ranking higher in SEO is click through rate.

So if anyone ever asks you whether PPC can help SEO, you can tell them “damn right it does”.  Without conversion optimization tricks and landing page tests carried out in PPC campaigns, SEO conversion could take months or years to optimize.  In addition, the mere presence of PPC ads in sponsored search can boost click through on natural search results, thereby increasing your page’s rank (not=PageRank) over time.

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