Can Adwords Increase Organic Traffic?

[Mike.Bean]

Hello,

A friend of mine has noticed an increase in organic traffic since they started using AdWords. Has anyone had similar results or could this be coincidence?

Thanks in advance!

[AHC_SEO]

In theory, they should have no impact. However, I do think that seeing the ad and then seeing the link in the organic results as well makes a searcher feel more compelled to click. My traffic increase coincided with Adwords budget increase too. I'd been doing some SEO work before though and I'd like to think it was more that. Will be interesting to see how others have got on.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

I feel it's pretty indirect but there can be benefits. I use paid as it pertains to organic traffic in the following ways:

Brand awareness - If you are looking to capture a particular niche or industry and don't have a well established name or brand, start looking into keywords to bid on that can garner a bit more attention for your brand. This will help users not only see your brand and name, but it will help build the association between you brand and an industry. It's also a great way to introduce your products, the benefits of that product, and why you should not be the best choice, but the only choice in the industry.

Keyword / query testing - If you have a list of keywords/queries that you are looking to target, paid is a great way to test your hunches and see how users engage with your content. Are you answering their question? Are you selling yourself well enough for conversions for particular keywords/queries? What is your Quality Score for keywords/queries your testing? Do you need to improve your content? These questions can help you moving forward with your content creation that helps SEO.

Content distribution - I love using paid search for quick content distribution, especially if it's timely and relevant. It helps get eyes on it quicker and can also help speed up the sharing process, which Google is thought to look into a bit to help gauge what's popular on the web. Again, this is just speculation, but it's been talked about in a few studies.

These are the ways that I see paid indirectly helping with your organic traffic and visibility. It helps build your brand, helps you better gauge your keywords and how your content is converting certain keywords, as well as helps get your content out quicker and efficiently through targeting. While not direct, there are benefits from a paid search standpoint that can help indirectly with organic search.

Let me know if this helps - good luck!

[Alick300]

Great answer Patrick  you didn't miss a single point.

[Mike.Bean]

What about the CTR of your website? Google says "increased CTR as well as more traffic makes your website increase in authority" - therefore increasing organic ranking of all or most keywords - (Google didn't say that part but it makes sense).

If AdWords provides both of these things to your website wouldn't your organic rankings increase / increase over time?