Running Adwords Campaigns to show Improvement in Organic Traffic

[SEOPractices]

Hi mozers, I have a new client who contacted because his organic traffic dropped all of a sudden from 5000 visits per month to 300 visits per month.

I have been reviewing his website profile and there are several reasons that take me to beleave the agency that managed his account until 3 months ago, was doing PPC to show improvement in the orgranic (SEO Service) traffic.

1. The Website was showing traffic for several highly competitive keywords

2. Most of the traffic 95% was driven to the home page with several groups of keywords

3. The website has just a few external links with anchor text not related to keywords sending traffic.

Is anyone familiar with this type of practice? Thanks in advanced.

[Marcus_Miller]

Have you got historical analytics? You can segregate traffic into paid or organic and find out exactly where his traffic was coming from.

It certainly sounds a bit fishy but where is  he getting these figures from? To be honest, it does not really matter what the old agency were doing and I would not waste too much energy on that!

Cheers
Marcus

[SEOPractices]

Thanks Marcus, the client wants to know.  One of our main tasks is to find out what happened with the "supposedly dropped in organic traffic".  I have the Analytics and Webmasters account.

So I was told you could run a PPC campaign setting auto tagging off and this traffic will not be reported in Analytics as paid, instead it will be reported as organic traffic.

What I figured is the Old Agency was doing the SEO for them and to keep the client and show fast results they could be running a PPC campaign.  The client left the Agency and right after that "organic traffic dropped".

[SEOPractices]

Direct Traffic has been incresing, referral traffic is normal, while organic traffic has decreased from 15.000 per month in Nov to 518 per month in March.

[vforvinnie]

Hi,

I can't think of it off the top of my head but one of the keyword spy websites has a tool that shows PPC history I believe.  This could help you know the source of the old traffic. Does anyone know what site I am talking about?  It might actually be keywordspy.

That is interested that in analytics you can disable PPC tracking.  That could help scammers sell websites claiming organic traffic.

[SEOPractices]

Thanks Vinnie.  There is an actual PPC campaing running, an "official Adwords campaign" that has been running all this time.

But to me there had to be a parallel Adwords campaign running that time until December when the client left the SEO Agency.

So the agency was hired to do PPC and SEO.  It seems to me they run one official Adwords Campaign and one "hidden Adwords Campaign" to show fast organic traffic results to the client.

I just don´t see any elements on that website that shows me they actually ranked for the keywords sending traffic:  The Website has just a few links (20), no anchor text optimized, most keywords where sending traffic to the home page, etc.