I took some time off yesterday morning from debating the Eskom Load Shedding to hang out at the Quirk eMarketing breakfast, where Rob Stokes was speaking about Search. I was expecting a bit of fluff on what search marketing is, and the basics on SEO (getting visitors for free from the search engines) and PPC (paying the search engines for visitors).
I WAS WRONG! (and pleasantly surprised)
While Rob stared longingly at us eating our breakfasts at the Verandah restaurant at the Metropole hotel (I had french toast with maple syrup), he spoke Search. And more search!
I was HIGHLY impressed. Usually when you attend these type of events, the information is very low level - here, Rob’s attitude was more along the lines of…
Quirk knows what it is doing to get your site listed high but it doesn’t come cheap, as it’s a lot of work, so here is a complete overview of what we do to get you listed high in the engines - HOWEVER, every variable (and there are MANY variables) is important - which is why you can get your website search optimised yourself, alternatively we’re just a call away. (that’s my summing up of what I think Rob was thinking :))
As an SEO course for guys who want to understand Search, the Quirk breakfast was perfect. However, even for more advanced search guys, it was an EXCELLENT refresher course, and it got me thinking about some areas, that I knew but wasn’t practising.
I only asked one question, and unfortunately Quirk hasn’t done any testing on it, so please let me know if you have tested or know of anyone who has an opinion on…
Does a PPC campaign effect an Organic campaign DIRECTLY? Not in terms of improving your website so you are more optimised, but does the fact that you have ads appearing on google and other websites (google contextual ads) give you higher ranking on search terms? A number of people have been ADAMANT in the last few months that a paid search campaign boosts your natural search campaign. One guy told me that he wasn’t getting any free traffic - he set up a PPC campaign, and almost immediately he started showing up high on GREAT KEYWORDS on the ORGANIC side!
Has anyone tested PPC effects on Organic Search?
Howz this for co-incidence? I mentioned to Georgina sitting next to me what I do - but didn’t go into specifics…after chatting for a few minutes, I mentioned one of the new ventures that i’m involved in - springleap - and the DAY BEFORE she was chatting to her friend who showed her a website she had been involved in - it was our designer!! What a small world!
A good breakfast, a great speaker, and a 2 hour discussion about search marketing - thanks Rob - I enjoyed it!
PS: Catherine from the super brilliant PR company I use - Mango OMC, was sitting next to me and introduced me to Ian from GetClosure, a LONG NEEDED South African start-up giving us a new avenue to complain other than Hello Peter - CHECK IT OUT….
26 responses so far ↓
1 Michelle Clarke (Sparkie) // Jan 30, 2008 at 9:30 am
Hey Eric - it’s been a while! interesting post, and i have to say that i fully agree that running a PPC campaign definitely does improve your search listings organically. Although, i have not yet done in-depth testing, I have seen evidence of this in the last couple of months with our website. The amount of traffic sent to that specific search term via PPC traffic, definitely kicks that specific term much higher on the organic side. I have been watching a specific search term and have seen the effects within 2 months - we were on page 1 and not too far from the top either. So I have to say that I agree with this theory. I will be doing some testing and can hopefully come up with fantastic results. Will be sure to let you know! Keep well, cheers
2 Eric // Jan 30, 2008 at 9:43 am
heya Sparkie
the guys from Quirk let me know they are going to try test as well, so looking forward to hearing what the results are
3 Christine // Jan 30, 2008 at 10:06 am
Hey Eric,
This is an age-old debate, something which I vaguely remember we’d discussed many moons ago as well
SEO and PPC are not directly linked at all IMO. This is an SEM myth, one of many conspiracies.
HOWEVER,
1. the PPC algo has evolved to factor in many organic elements as well. What I mean by this is that to run your PPC campaign optimally (as you know), your landing pages’ content need to reflect keywords accurately too and be highly relevant to the ad & keywords you’re bidding on. This brings down click costs and boosts ranking.
2. Now I can’t speak for your acquaintance as I do not know the variables of the situation: how long was his site running before he commenced a PPC campaign, did he make any changes to his content pages? What keywords / key-phrases are we talking about? Is the industry competitive (altho what industry isn’t competitive anymore…) etc etc
So one scenario could be that his site had been running a while, and just so happened that when he ’switched on’ his PPC campaign, the natural organic side kicked-in….
3. AND also because his site was getting more traffic all of a sudden, therefore more interaction and activity on his site - which SEs will pick up, Google ‘naturally assumes’ the site to be more relevant, therefore paying more attention to the content, therefore boosting the key-phrases it finds the site to be optimised for on the organic side too..
I hope that makes sense? lol
4 Michelle Clarke (Sparkie) // Jan 30, 2008 at 10:29 am
Hi Chris - it’s actually Michelle Clarke here (Sparkie)
just to clarify a few points. Our website has only been live since September 2007, so has not been running that long. Content on our site is constantly being updated and becoming more and more relevant. Obviously i know that we need specific and targeted landing pages, so I have best and well targeted landing pages possible for all keywords in my campaign. I have noticed with one specific search term (an actual product, so not a generic keyword) that it has been receiving a large amount of traffic on it, and once paused, came through on page one of Google’s natural listings within the first month / 2 months of going live. To me, there has to be some kind of link between the two. As I said to Eric, I have not done in-depth research here, but have noticed that somehow there must be some kind of link?
Your points are interesting, can it really just be myth? And yes, your points do make sense
5 Eric // Jan 30, 2008 at 10:37 am
Christine - have asked the guy to post what happened…
My feeling is - do as much as possible - and even things you weren’t planning to happen, might happen…So by setting up PPC, you might optimise the pages in the process and improve your quality score, you might get extra traffic and boost the relevancy etc etc…
6 Andrew // Jan 30, 2008 at 10:53 am
Hey Guys, I’ve also heard of many people who claim that this is the case, but officially, Google deny it. Matt Cutts was asked this question at Pubcon in 2006, and he denied it. Derrick also confirmed that at SES last year, the question was asked twice, and Google denied it, twice.
To do a test, you would need to take both a brand new site, with few or very little pages, and do NOTHING to it. No links etc. Leave it for a few months. Then run a PPC campaign, while still changing nothing, and see if there’s a change, while monitoring all the seo stats (incoming links etc).
For interest, read this:
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3626828
7 Eric // Jan 30, 2008 at 11:05 am
Thanks Andrew - wonder if any tests have been done to date?
8 Rob Stokes // Jan 30, 2008 at 11:10 am
Whilst there is a definite case to be made for SEO impacting PPC quality score and therefore campaign effectiveness, I have never seen a shred of evidence supporting the claim for PPC impacting organic rankings.
Quite frankly i would seriously doubt that a causal relationship exists as it would no doubt undermine Google’s credibility when it comes to delivering unbiased, relevant results.
However, whilst the relationship may not be directly causal, i think a PPC campaign can have an indirect effect on SEO. For example, increased traffic and awareness can generate inbound links which will boost organic rankings.
All that said, I’m always open to be proven wrong so lets figure out a sound methodology to test this and see what happens…
9 Andrew // Jan 30, 2008 at 11:15 am
Don’t think so, so it’ll be interesting to see what quirk comes up with.
10 Christine // Jan 30, 2008 at 11:16 am
Hey Andrew, good idea, nice call ;)- Google has always denied this, but the conspiracy theories around this has been floating about for years.
Mich - glad to see things are well with ADH
Site being up since September, constantly being updated - there’s your answer
Even for new sites, that are optimised and content relevant, I see results within 3 months of go-live. Its sustaining those positions and proving relevance on a monthly basis that is key to consistent & maintained ranking
11 Michelle Clarke (Sparkie) // Jan 30, 2008 at 11:34 am
Hey Chris
You’re right - the hard work starts once the results start coming through - the joy of our jobs
I look forward to seeing the results of (or assisting with ;-)) Rob’s tests.
12 Allen Jaffe // Jan 30, 2008 at 12:02 pm
I often see people claiming that their site was boosted in the SERPS after starting or spending more on PPC, the same goes with the opposite, they stopped their PPC campaign or lowered their budget and now their organic listings have slipped.
Remember there are hundreds of variables at work, and most of the time its coincidence or change in big “Gâ€â€™s algorithm. People might like to think that their direct adwords action caused a reaction, however I have seen no evidence of this being true.
Googles organic listings are perceived as credible and unbiased and if they manipulated these results based on advertiser revenue spend, then they would lose all credibility.
13 Rob Stokes // Jan 30, 2008 at 12:17 pm
That Clickz article is great and I pretty much agree with it completely.
To test this however, the first thing we need to do is to put together a methodology for a test - tricky!
We could create an island site and quite frankly if it got indexed purely as a result of a link from PPC ads I’d be pretty shocked.
If it didn’t we’d have to link to it which would inherently compromise the validity of the experiment.
So how do we create a true, statistically significant test? All comments welcome.
I think I may as well add that I’m so convinced that PPC doesn’t affect SEO that I think the opportunity cost of running such a valid test would be too high to justify it right now. We are always running experiments at Quirk as we don’t believe in taking gut feel over proven results, especially when it comes to client’s sites (in fact Rafiq is running an interesting test right now which we will reveal to you soon). Of course every company has a finite set of resources and tests are 100% a cost of doing business - i.e. they don’t make money directly. As such we can’t run an infinite number of tests and quite frankly I think there are better experiments to run.
All that said (and yes i’m a little grumpy today because i seem to develop insomnia in JHB), one thing i will do is set up a one page island site and buy paid ads to it to see if it gets indexed. Thats quick to do and would be helluva interesting if it worked. And if it does work, I’ll concede to testing further the impact of PPC on SEO.
Loving the debate, let me know what y’all think,
14 Eric // Jan 30, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Rob - that’s a neat way of testing. an obscure site with the only links coming from google (and contextual) and see how quickly it gets indexed and if it ranks on the chosen phrase/s
15 Heidi Edelmuller // Jan 30, 2008 at 1:56 pm
As pointed out, it would be very unethical for Google to allow their paid search to influence their organic search directly - and I’m sure Google would be very careful around this issue as their reputation is on the line.
However, I definitely believe that PPC activity will help a site’s organic ranking indirectly - through the factors Christine and the SEW article mentioned. I think the indirect influence is a strong enough argument to always consider PPC for a brand new site. Plus all the valuable information gained from a PPC campaign will never go to waste
16 Luke // Jan 30, 2008 at 2:02 pm
I would say that any meaningful organic gains from a PPC campaign would be indirect, stemming from the following:
We recently had a jump up the SERP’s for one of VWSA’s sites co-incide with the termination of a pretty full-on PPC campaign which had us at no.1 for a broad match on our main site keyword, one we were previously coming in nowhere for organically.
I’d put that down to the following factors:
1. Increased traffic to targeted landing pages leads to more relevant inbound links
2. Creating the PPC landing page, with relevant content and optimised front end can only serve to further your organic aims.
3. Organic ranking takes time. If you’re running a PPC campaign you’ve no doubt also been working to rank well organically for those keywords. A jump up the rankings may co-incide with the PPC campaign purely because thats how long it took for your initial optimisation work to settle into the SERP’s.
Less of a certainty in my mind, but a definite possibility is the following:
1. Google measures the fidelity of your PPC ad and keywords against your landing page and wider site content. This obviously gives them a clearer understanding of what your site’s about.
It wouldn’t totally surprise me if they incorporated these learnings into returning more relevant organic results, especially given that we know they are using Analytics data to do exactly that. This SEOmoz post elaborates: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/proof-google-is-using-behavioral-data-in-rankings
17 Marc // Jan 30, 2008 at 2:05 pm
I think that Chris completely hit the nail on the head with this comment:
“1. the PPC algo has evolved to factor in many organic elements as well. What I mean by this is that to run your PPC campaign optimally (as you know), your landing pages’ content need to reflect keywords accurately too and be highly relevant to the ad & keywords you’re bidding on. This brings down click costs and boosts ranking.”
The natural ranking of the site is indirected influenced by the good QS optimisation of the landing page(s).
…exciting times me thinks….
18 Michelle Clarke (Sparkie) // Jan 30, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Excting times indeed Marc - as I pointed out earlier, the search term I have been monitoring has a hugely relevant landing page, with content mentioning that search term numerous times.
So while I agree with what Heidi says, “it would be very unethical for Google to allow their paid search to influence their organic search directly” - I still believe there is that INDIRECT link. It comes down to the PPC side’s QS, relevancy in content, high quality landing pages which in return provides those inbound links. I just find it interesting that not only does Google deny any link (and I’m not questioning their credibility) but they also refuse to make any comment when such questions arise… any ideas or reason why?
19 Anthony // Jan 30, 2008 at 2:32 pm
I wrote about an analogous scenario to Michelle’s non-generic brand name on a my blog last year (on sharing the link-love).
My blog didn’t come up in the first few pages when I searched on my name. I renamed my ‘About’ page ‘About Anthony Hazell’, renamed the photo ‘Anthony-Hazell’ and used the name a couple of times in text. Then I got a few class-mates in the course I was attending to link to my blog using my name. Within a couple of weeks, my blog was number one on Google and Yahoo for that search term.
The point is, if you have a search term that’s not all that common, it’s pretty easy to optimise your site for that term. Optimising for terms that are more widely used (and competed for) is a lot more hard work.
20 Eric // Jan 30, 2008 at 2:36 pm
i think you have to differentiate between ppc on google and on the contextual sites.
if you advertise ppc on google on contextual, and your ads get featured on other sites, then there is an influence, although i’m not sure how much
reason being that if i search google sometimes, it brings up pages where the only reason for that result is that the page features a contextual advertiser
so googlebot / or the google cache is picking up a page at the particular moment an ad is showing on it, and it gets included in the serps
21 Werner de Bruin // Jan 30, 2008 at 2:59 pm
I on the other hand don’t believe that their are any direct connections between your organic and PPC rankings. SEO indirectly improves your PPC quality score by making your pages more relevant; but I have not seen any correlation between organic rankings and phrases from your PPC campaign.
Will setup the test today and see what happens over the next month. I would be very surprised if the site does get indexed, not even to mention ranking.
22 David Donde // Jan 30, 2008 at 10:58 pm
wow! lots of talk about little ol me’s problem. It was my site. The site has been live since Mid 2006! major change 8 months ago, since then regular small news added. I often check where I organically rank on some major terms and have been surprised sometimes how low even our company’s name (Origin coffee Roasting, pardon the punt)scored!
Long story short, I registered for google pay per click and was stunned! Here I was near or at the top of most searches after 2 days! Yes, click throughs would raise my organic status, but I only had about 20-30 in that first period! I believe google considered my keywords somehow more relevant when bots searched or however that works exactly. To be perfectly frank I don’t really care that much as to why it had such a dramatic effect. Happy that it did though….
23 AlterSage.com Blog » Does PPC Influence Organic SEO? // Jan 31, 2008 at 12:54 pm
[...] is a little debate started on Eric’s blog yesterday which got quite a few people involved. It was quite interesting to see the reactions from [...]
24 Seo // Jan 31, 2008 at 4:45 pm
i dont need to do a seo course as i am a seo
but many seo are those who dont clear their concepts and start doing seo.
25 Damian Burke // Feb 1, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Hello All,
Well, Rob Stokes and the rest of the Quirk crew have set up a test to provide an answer to this question…
Czech out our blog post here:
http://www.gottaquirk.com/post/1157/test-ppc-campaigns-organic-results#comments
26 Eric says » Quirk Breakfast: Online Advertising & Affiliate Marketing // Feb 24, 2008 at 7:41 pm
[...] SEO Course [...]
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