I am making good on a promise with this post. A few weeks ago I wrote a post and promised to write about how PPC can help your SEO.

4. Traffic to your site.

The number of visits to your site may or may not impact how you rank in Google. It may or may not be one of the hundreds of data points about your website that Google uses in its algorithm. You can believe that or not. I believe it. I don’t know that it can be proven or if someone has tried to prove it, or if Matt Cutts has said that it does or does not.

Either way, I can say most certainly that the more people you have going to your site and seeing your content, the higher the chances are that people will like your content and decide to share it and link to it.

3. Data

You can learn so much from the traffic that comes to your site.  Use the keyword data to learn what keywords you have the highest click through rates on. Learn what long tail keywords you may want to write a blog post about. Learn which keywords have a high  bounce rate. Are those keywords you want to try to optimize your website for, or will it not be worth the time? Which keywords convert the most? Which keywords are the most profitable. Use that data to prioritize what SEO work you should do first. I should note that in some cases ranking organically will draw a different crowd that may behave very differently than the people that originally clicked on your PPC ads.

2. More Organic Clicks

Ranking organically and with a paid ad on the same keyword is going to increase the total organic and paid clicks you get to your site. So often, people stop advertising when they rank organically, what they don’t realize is that while their may be some cannibalization of adspend, overall they will increase the click through rate of their organic listings  Why? Because when your ad shows up twice you subliminally send a message to the searcher that your site is more relevant, and more deserving of a click if Google shows you twice and everyone else just once.

Case in point:

I did a search for “Retractable Banners.” I started scrolling down to the results, skimming over the ads to the organic results. By the time I got done reading the second organic result I had already seen the buildasign.com URL 5x.

PS. I heard high CTRs on organic listings is a sign to Google that they should continue ranking your site highly on that keyword…can any one verify? If so, comment with a link to that info.

1. PPC Can Help Content Go Viral

Paying for eyes on your content can help your content go viral. Just ask the big Youtubers. One way they start to grow their following and gain subscribers is by promoting their videos. The same can happen for an infographic or a white paper or an ebook or an article.  Keep posting your articles and the same people will share it to their same followers. If it is REALLY amazing that will be enough for it to take off, but it will take off and be shared by new people that would only see it if you pay to get it in front of them on their screen.

I heard viral content was good for business and for links and stuff like that.

Do you have any other reasons why you believe PPC can help your SEO results? Any one that disagrees?