Does PPC affect SEO? 

The simple answer: No.

The better answer: No… and yes, sort of.

The detailed answer:

Running a PPC campaign on Google Ads does not directly affect your Google organic ranking. However, there are several indirect ways that running paid search ads may help your SEO efforts.

The separation between PPC and SEO

Google is committed to keeping its paid and organic teams separate. Engineers, product managers, program managers, and the Search Quality team will not allow paid search to impact how a site ranks in the organic results.

Google has talked about the intentional divide often, but Gary Illyes, a webmaster trends analyst at Google, provides us with one explicit example on Twitter:

Despite Google’s repeated insistence of this wall of separation, conspiracy theories among marketers persist. It usually goes something like this: “Does PPC affect SEO? Well, we started spending a lot on Google Ads, and our organic performance improved, so it must.” Ta-da!

If it were that easy, you could simply pay your way to better organic rankings. The cynics among us might believe that to be the case, but Google has unequivocally stated that its “first responsibility is to provide Search users with the most relevant possible results. If businesses were able to pay for higher rankings in the search results, users wouldn’t be getting the information they’re looking for.”

So once and for all:

Does PPC affect SEO? No. But even so, running PPC campaigns may lead to better organic rankings.

Here are four ways how:

1. Ads can improve organic CTR

In 2011, Google researchers published a study that showed that when users saw an ad and an organic listing for the same website, they may be more likely to click on the organic listing, or they may be more likely to click that ad upon seeing a high-ranking organic listing. In other words, the ad and the organic listing reinforce each other, improving the click-through rate of both.

As Rand Fishkin explained it on Moz, 1+1 equals 2.2.

“…let’s say I’m running Seattle Whale Tours, and I search for whale watching while I’m in town. I see an ad for Seattle Whale Tours, and then I see an organic result. It could be the case, let’s say that my normal click-through rate, if there was only the ad, was one, and my normal click-through rate if I only saw the organic listing was one. Let’s imagine this equation: 1 plus 1 is actually going to equal something like 2.2. It’s going to be a little bit higher, because seeing these two together biases you, biases searchers to generally be more likely to click these than they otherwise would independent of one another. This is why many people will bid on their brand ads.”

While your paid CTR won’t affect your organic page ranking, that incremental improvement of your organic listing could.

2. Ads are a gateway to organic engagement

A user who has been exposed to a company via a PPC ad may be more likely to revisit the company’s website in the future, often via its organic listing.

A common scenario: I click on a paid search ad for Brand X. I’m not quite ready to buy until I do some further research. Some time passes, but on my next Google search, I click on Brand X’s organic listing. I might even search Brand X by name.

A higher click-through rate and higher on-page engagement can both lead to a higher ranking. Seeing that first ad strengthened my association with the brand, so upon seeing the organic result the second time around, I’m more likely to click it, more inclined to engage with the site, and more inclined to convert or click that Buy button.

3. Ads can encourage links and shares

When someone visits your website and your content meets the needs of what they were searching for, they might then do any of the following:

  • share your site via social media
  • link to your site on their own website
  • provide media coverage
  • mention your brand elsewhere online

Any of these amplification actions might increase your site’s CTR, on-page engagement, and conversions, further improving the signals your site is sending to Google.

4. PPC encourages good SEO practices

As you are building PPC campaigns, you put a lot of thought into optimizing your landing pages (at least we hope so!). You create relevant content around a tight keyword theme. You link to other helpful parts of your site. You optimize the site for mobile. You build the page with speedy page load time in mind.

This purposeful page-building is usually done in the pursuit of a high Google Ads Quality Score. But these tactics and best practices are also useful for improving organic rankings.

Google even touts how its PPC tools may be used for SEO:

“Google Ads comes with a suite of tools that you can use to figure out how to optimize your site. For example, the Keyword Tool can help you create a list of terms related to your business that generate a lot of searches, which you could then integrate into your site’s content. You can also use Google Ads tracking tools to measure whether changes to your site and ad campaign are leading to more visitors or conversions.”

Building your site well for PPC also helps build it well for SEO.

PPC and SEO working together

The best scenario for most brands is an integrated approach. PPC campaigns will give your site exposure almost immediately, whereas organic listings take time to earn. However, over the long term, users often put higher trust in the organic results (not to mention these clicks are free of charge to you).

Pursuing both PPC and SEO success increases your overall share of search traffic. By attaining the highest level of visibility and presence in search results, you maximize your traffic and lead generation opportunity, particularly around the keywords that are strategically important to your business.

Kim Kohatsu
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