This is the question that many SEO professionals and digital marketers are trying to establish an answer to. Although Google themselves say that “Running a Google AdWords campaign does not help your SEO rankings”, some advertisers have noticed a strong relation between these two factors. In this article, we are going to share the results of our own findings.
PPC and SEM
We set up the PPC campaign for our business, thinking more about SEM (search engine marketing). The main focus of this campaign was to promote the services we offer and to get more visitors on our website. At the time of creating the adverts, we wanted to drive people to the website and increase brand awareness. But what we discovered later while analysing the results was even more surprising.
PPC goals
Our campaign used two advert formats, search and display. Each of them had a different goal and purpose. The Google AdWords search campaign targeted specific keywords that users were looking for. The purpose of this advert was to increase online conversions by driving the right audience to the site who are looking for digital marketing and web design services. Whereas display adverts in the banner format had a goal to increase the brand awareness and be visible to users who don’t necessarily search for our services but might be interested in them, based on their browsing behavior.
PPC results
Over the time the campaign was running, we managed to achieve our objectives. Our goal completions increased by nearly 30%. We also got nearly 40% more visits on the site and 43% more users accessed our site during the campaign.
What is interesting, however, is we discovered that the organic ranking for some of our targeted keywords has improved. Some of them even went up by a very significant number. For example, our ranking went 89 positions up for the keywords ‘marketing online services’ although we didn’t include this phrase in our paid adverts. Other keywords such as ‘Berkshire web design’ and ‘seo agency reading’ also recorded good Google ranking improvement, 24 and 12 positions up accordingly.
Following our findings, we also noticed an increase in our organic traffic by nearly double (97%).
PPC and SEO
These results provided us with enough evidence to believe that PPC campaign has a positive impact on organic ranking and it should be part of any SEO strategy.
Of course, there are other advantages of running Google PPC adverts such as targeting people from a specific location, by interest or a device they use. Setting up a campaign in Google Adwords is also relatively easy and it’s a good approach to enhance your business online presence.
