As a general rule, anything that is easy to manipulate will not affect search engine optimization. Think about it: if your traffic made your website rank higher, you could hire someone or program a bot to click through to your website and climb up in rankings just by doing that. Equally, if you could improve your organic rankings by buying Google ads, you could manipulate your online presence with mere money. For this reason, we believe Google when they say that it is not true that Google ads affect your SEO.
However, Google ads can help you with your SEO
We manage Google ads for some of the clients we blog for. Google ads allow us to see the keywords that are performing well for our clients, as well as the search terms that bring people to their website but which need more content. This is an important source of information for our content strategy decisions.
Say your climbing gym ad account shows search terms relating to the cost of a climbing gym membership — but your website doesn’t present that information. Now you know that people are looking for that. You know that people who are looking for that information are actually clicking through to your website, and you are disappointing them.
That is very useful information.
There is also research showing that people who see both a Google ad and a top organic result for the same website are more likely to click through on one or the other. Seeing both increases the feeling that they can trust you and the impression that you have something valuable to show hem.
SEO helps with Google ads
At the same time, having a well-optimized landing page for your ads gives you better results from those ads. You have higher quality scores, which means showing up higher on the page and paying less per click or conversion. This is one of the most important factors for getting the best ROI from Google ads.
Setting up ads that link to your homepage and ignoring the content of your page is one of the main ways people find themselves spending too much on ads and getting poor results. You may think of ads as an alternative to SEO, but the truth is that they work well together.
So what’s the answer?
In the sense of being able to buy yourself better organic placement with ads — no, there is no connection between your ads and your organic rankings. On the other hand, your SEO efforts support your ads, and vice versa.
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