As more and more businesses venture into the digital space, one question keeps popping up when speaking with our SEO specialists.
“Does paying on Google Ads help boost our SEO rankings?”
As native Sydney SEOs, we understand the basis of this popular SEO myth and how it came to be. After all, it only makes sense that Google would prioritise paying customers over non-paying customers, right?
The straightforward answer is no. Paying to run a Google Ads campaign does not help boost your organic SEO rankings.
Why Google Ads Don’t Help Boost SEO Rankings
To keep it short, Google Ads cover a different space altogether in Google’s search results.
Google highlighted the stark contrast between pay-per-click (PPC) ads and search engine optimisation (SEO).
The search engine states that websites could pay for Google Ads to display their site in ad-specific areas or search results labelled as an ad.
Remember that PPC ads don’t affect organic SERPs since paid links don’t mix with organic search rankings. Besides, doing so creates ethical and competition concerns, which we’ll cover below.
Antitrust Laws & Competition Issues
If paid links from Google Ads influenced a website’s ability to rank highly, it would contradict Google’s purpose of delivering accurate and high quality information.
Hypothetically, brands could pay for their SEO rankings and expect poor-quality content to produce great results. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Google may also face legal issues and lawsuits if paid links would affect organic rankings. That’s because it violates international antitrust and competition laws, given that large-scale businesses with massive resources could easily dominate the search results pages.
Remember that one page of quality content with keyword optimisation can rank for several search keywords at once when properly optimised. More people also trust organic results over paid search results, and to compromise the legitimacy of organic results would ultimately defeat the search engine’s purpose.
Can I Use Google Ads & SEO Together?
Yes, you can. Depending on your goals, Google Ads and SEO can be used together to feed each channel valuable data.
In other words, you can collect relevant data by using both Google Ads and SEO and, in turn, combine those insights into a single data-driven strategy to get optimum results.
While they’re essentially different from one another, each campaign has its strengths that can be leveraged to drive faster results, while maximising your ROI.
Experience SEO that Delivers Results
Relying on Google Ads alone can only go so far at the expense of limited resources. It may act as a great short-term marketing strategy to drive leads, however, in the long term, we believe that is rarely the case unless combined with SEO.
If you’re currently running Google Ads and would like to chat about leveraging SEO, call us today. You will be scheduled with a senior SEO consultant who will be able to discuss your unique needs.
Daniel Law
Daniel Law is the SEO Director at Red Search, a specialist SEO agency based in Sydney, Australia. With over 15 years of experience in the industry, Daniel has a wealth of knowledge and expertise in search engine optimisation. He is passionate about helping businesses achieve sustainable growth through effective SEO, and stays across every shift in the search landscape.