Does PPC affect your organic rankings?

 

I have heard somewhere that it does. If this is the case then it is very unfair.

 

Has anybody else heard this and whats the rationale behind it do you think?

What a coincidence!

 

I was just asking that very same question.

 

I'm not sure it's unfair to be honest. I have just started a PPC campaign in order to get people to my site. My site is relevant, informative and well built (from a content point of view).

 

I am hoping that as more people click through and use the site, the more google will trust it and increase it's organic rankings. I know it's unfair in that not everybody has the budget to do this, but I am running a business and my competitors invest in PPC. It makes sense that I must too.

 

I try to optimise my site purely for organic reasons, but this can take an age to come into effect - time I can't afford to lose.

 

It might sound a bit mercenary - but that's my point of view.

In a nutshell no, running a PPC Campaign will have no direct impact on your rankings.

Its an interesting question.

 

Offically Google says that ppc does not influence organic search.

 

However... If you see PPC as a way of marketing and generating traffic instead of boosting SEO per se. It can be incredibly useful giving your site and content an added (although sometimes subliminal) level of trust, especially when you rank highly in organic search.

 

"The most widely held belief, however, is that a combination of PPC and organic keywords is the best approach. This theory would seem to have a lot of validity. According to some researchers, PPC programs tend to be much more effective if an organization also has organic keywords that rank in the same area as the PPC ranks. For example, if you’ve bid on a keyword that’s consistently placed number two or three in search engine returns, and you have organic keywords that fall in the next few slots, you’re likely to find better conversion numbers than either organic keywords or PPC programs can bring on their own."

SEO v PPC article

Does PPC affect your organic rankings?

 

No - no evidence to support otherwise. Tested personally on a few dev sites in the past and had no change.

 

Andrew Wheeler