The question is often posed, does SEO impact PPC?
As part of the running calculation which sets the quality score for a keyword, a PPC platform spiders the landing page associated with each keyword to assess the relevancy across keyword, ad copy, and landing page content. Therefore landing pages with content relevant to the keyword, and correct on-page SEO optimization will tend to pull higher PPC quality scores.
So the answer is yes, SEO does tend to positively impact PPC search campaign performance. But it’s an indirect relationship.
Do paid ads impact SEO?
More frequently you hear the argument that running paid ads in a PPC account – paying the company that owns the search engine – will improve SEO performance. We have seen no evidence to indicate that there is any type of nefarious connection between paid search and organic search.
However, things that should be done to improve PPC quality scores, can also improve SEO rankings. So there is an indirect connection.
Common Attributes Of High-Quality Landing Pages
PPC platforms and their integral organic search engine both utilize spiders to crawl landing pages. The ranking signals used for organic search, and PPC quality score assessment share similar characteristics.
PPC platforms assess landing pages using multiple attributes as part of assigning a quality score definition. A PPC platform assesses these attributes quickly by utilizing spider and analytics data:
- Does the landing page have the keyword?
- What’s the keyword density?
- Where do the off-site links go and is the content on them relevant?
- What is the alt tag on images and are they relevant?
- What is the content internally linked to and are they relevant pages?
- If we follow the internal links, what do they lead to, and is it relevant?
- What is the user experience likely to be on this page?
- Are the engagement metrics strong?
- Does the page convert?
All of these common factors impact how both search engines and PPC platforms assess a web page.
Conspiracy Theories About SEO And PPC
There are some who enjoy winding together a conspiracy theory while attributing the commercial profit motive to paid ads, as the villain behind the scenes. This doesn’t hold up well, as it would be complex and self-defeating to build this type of mechanism into search engine algorithms. Search engines are constantly updated, relying upon thousands of engineers and computer scientists to maintain. The cat would be out of the bag in no time.
The bottom line on SEO impacting PPC, and PPC impacting SEO. It shouldn’t be a surprise that PPC and SEO are synergistic. It’s an indirect, versus a direct cause-and-effect relationship.