Understanding How PPC Affects SEO
There’s a lot of debate about how an organization should use organic keyword marketing versus the
way those same organizations should use PPC marketing. And there seem to be two (and pos- sibly three) distinct camps about what should and shouldn’t happen with these different of types marketing,
The first position is that PPC programs can hurt organic
keyword programs. According to subscribers to this position, PPC programs
damage organic rankings because the act of paying for a listing auto- matically
reduces the rank of your organic keyword efforts. Those who follow this theory
believe that there is no place for PPC programs.
Another position in this argument is that PPC has no effect
at all on SEO. It’s a tough concept to swallow, because one would naturally
believe that any organization paying for a specific rank in search returns
would automatically push organic keyword returns into a lower slot (which sup-
ports the first theory). Those who follow this theory believe that there is no
need to invest in PPC, because you can achieve the same results with organic
keywords, though it takes much longer for those results to become apparent.
The most widely held belief, however, is that a combination
of PPC and organic keywords is the best approach. This theory would seem to
have a lot of validity. According to some researchers, PPC pro- grams tend to
be much more effective if an organization also has organic keywords that rank
in the same area as the PPC ranks. For example, if you’ve bid on a keyword
that’s consistently placed num- ber two or three in search engine returns, and
you have organic keywords that fall in the next few slots, you’re likely to
find better conversion numbers than either organic keywords or PPC programs can
bring on their own.
It’s important to note here that all search engines make a
distinction between PPC and organic SEO. PPC doesn’t help your organic
rankings. Only those activities like tagging your web site properly, using
keyword placement properly, and including great content on your site will help
you on the organic side. PPC is a search marketing strategy.
NOTE
Throughout this book, you’ll like see the terms SEO and
search marketing used inter- changeably. Very strictly speaking, search
marketing and SEO are quite different activities. Search marketing includes any
activity that improves your search engine rankings-paid or organic. SEO, on the
other hand, usually refers to strictly the free, organic methods used to
improve search rank- ings. Very often, the two terms are used interchangeably
by people using SEO and search engine market- ing techniques. SEO and SEM
experts, however, will always clearly differentiate the activities.
PPC Is
Not Paid Inclusion!
ne distinction that is important for you to understand is
the difference between PPC and paid- inclusion (PI) services. Many people
believe that PPC and PI services are the same type of mar- keting, but there
can be some subtle differences. For starters, paid-inclusion services are used
by some search engines to allow web-site owners to pay a one-year subscription
fee to ensure that their site is indexed with that search engine
all the time. This fee doesn’t guarantee any specific rank
in search engine results; it only guarantees that the site is indexed by the
search engine.
Yahoo! is one company that uses paid inclusion to populate
its search index. Not all of the listings in Yahoo! are paid listings, however.
Yahoo! combines both normally spidered sites and paid sites. Many other search
engines have staunchly avoided using paid-inclusion services – Ask.com and
Google are two of the most notable – because most users feel that paid
inclusion can skew the search results. In fact, search engines that allow only
paid-inclusion listings are not likely to survive very long, because users
won’t use them.
There is a bit of a gray line between paid inclusion and
PPC. That line begins at about the point where both services are paid for.
Detractors of these types of programs claim that paying for a listing-any
listing is likely to make search returns invalid because the theory is that
search engines give higher ranking to paid-inclusion services, just as they do
to PPC advertisements.
