How PPC Affects SEO

On the internet there are many rumors regarding SEO and PPC. Some people believe in one story, other believe in another story. But if we simplify there are 2 camps of people regarding PPC affecting SEO.

Two major PPC beliefs

First camp represents people that are convinced that using PPC can hurt your organic keyword programs. They believe that PPC is damaging your organic positioning in SERPS. They think that paying for ranking through PPC will automatically lower your organic ranking coming from SEO because the major corporations will try to milk you for more money, because they have you on a paying costumers list. These people are against PPC programs, they even say there is not place for PPC programs.

The other camp is convinced that PPC have no effect on organic positioning. I would easier agre with first camp because it makes sense even if it sounds like cheating.

First camp think there is no need for PPC, because you can achieve better results with organic SEO even though it takes much longer to see the effects in SERPS.

Using both PPC and SEO at the same time

The most widely held belief is that using PPC and SEO is the best approach. It is especially effective if you have your site listed in top 3 positions in PPC results and in top 10 in organic search results. In that case the conversion is much bigger. So the conversion in this case from only SEO results or just PPC results is lower than the combination of both.

Each search engine makes a clear distinction between PPC and organic SEO. PPC is not helping your organic SEO. Only the pure organic SEO techniques like optimizing pages for the right keywords, writing great content, and building links will help improve your organic rankings. PPC is still only a search marketing strategy.

Paid inclusion services and PPC

Many people don’t make a distinction between pay per click (PPC) and paid inclusion (PI). There is a big difference. Many people believe that PPC and PI services are the same type of marketing, but there are differences. PI services are used by some search engines to allow website owners to pay a special yearly fee to ensure their site will be indexed with that search engine on regular basis. But that fee does not guarantee any rankings just indexing.

Yahoo! Search engine is using PI services. Not all listings in Yahoo come from paid listings. Yahoo still combines both normally indexed sites and paid sites. Most other search engines do not offer paid inclusion services including Google, because users feel that paid inclusion can skew the search results.

The end of PI services?

There is also no future for search engines that still offer paid inclusion services because more and more people will start avoiding them, because they are not giving the correct search results.

There is a little bit of similarity between paid inclusion and PPC, because both services are paid services.