Speculation on PPC advantage over organic rankings
Speculation that PPC get an advange
Does PPC really give you an advantage in the organic rankings?
Speculation that companies implementing PPC campaigns get an advantage in organic rankings has generated a lot of controversy in the world of internet marketing and search engine optimization. Many people argue that when you use pay per click (PPC), you have an advantage over someone who solely does search engine optimization only when it comes to search engines' organic rankings. But is this the truth? The simple answer is NO!
In the many years of search engine optimization, there has never been a confirmed case of PPC listings affecting the organic listings of a website in the search engines. A PPC campaign can help you during the initial website keywords research, as it will help you to identify the exact terms and keywords that people are searching for within your chosen niche. You can also use PPC to bring in the initial traffic to your site as you wait for your site to be indexed and to develop a strong stranding in the organic rankings. However, this is as far as ppc goes in helping with your organic listings. The notion that Google, for example, will assign you some ranking bonuses for paying in to their advertising program, Google Adwords, is simply a misconception on how ppc listings work. You get zero organic ranking benefits from this.
Increasing Link Popularity
Since the search engines results pages are not static and indexable pages, your ppc listings on these pages do not count as back links to your website. They therefore do not increase your link popularity. In any case, the actual link on the pay per click ad in the listing does not link directly to your website. This is also clouded by the fact that a search engine would never consider or count a link that is clearly obtained through advertising as a natural back link to a given website. The search engines would only go for links generated from other websites to yours for editorial reasons. That is, search engines will only count links pointing to your site if they are in the content of another website, besides yours, as a sign of value and relevance.
PPC Traffic and Ranking
A way that ppc can help you to obtain some links to your website is if you run an aggressive ppc campaign for a relatively long period of time. The visibility created can gain the interest of other website owners, who may have websites that are in a related field. If they think it can benefit their visitors if they provide you as an extra resource of value, information and authority, they may be willing to have a reciprocal link agreement with you. This will bring in the same natural links as would a normal search engine optimization effort. It can, therefore, not be directly attributed to the ppc listing as a ranking benefit.
For users who are familiar with your brand, they are more likely to click on your organic listing than on a ppc listing. However, the impression on the pay per click listing, backing up the organic listing, gives your brand an authority boost. In other words, if a user sees your site both on the search results, as well as in the sponsored ads listing, they are more likely to trust you as an authority brand. Your credibility can shoot through the roof if this happens on the first page of the search results. Owning both top positions for the free organic listing and the paid ad position easily outperforms owning just one of the top spots, be it either the paid spot, or the organic listing spot. This increases your click through rates, as well as your conversion rates.
The reasons above only justify the need for a ppc campaign to support your organic listing. However, they do not mean that you will be ranked better in the organic listings for using the ppc listings. The main benefit here is getting some paid traffic to help break even on the capital used to create your new site, as well as to generate some profit as you work towards getting your search engine optimization right. A successful SEO effort is the one that will lead to organic listing and lots of free traffic. Since the ppc campaign can be set up in a matter of minutes to start generating Traffic within hours, it is a good initial Traffic trigger. But as far as the speculation goes that ppc campaigns give an advantage in organic rankings - that is just not true.