Is the Absence of Adwords Adverse to your SEO?

We always leave Brighton SEO with some food for thought, and Matt Beswick’s closing talk certainly gives that this year. His thoughts regarding the correlation between your traditional SEO and your paid search operations added plenty of fuel to the already voracious fire. The fire is the digital marketer’s relationship with the almighty overlord, Google.

Mr Beswick wholeheartedly believes that paying these companies – whether using paid search or other outlets – benefits you massively. Matt’s slides (now available here) provide statistics on how his campaigns are seeing a boost now he pays the companies he was promoting with. Here we cover his talk and discuss – Is the Absence of Adwords Adverse to your SEO?

Why this might be happening

The argument comes from a simple and rational principle. These organisations are businesses and businesses exist to make money. The clients they serve are typically an end user rather than us SEOs. As a result they want to make both these end users and their stakeholders happy. This means better accuracy and greater revenue are top of their list.

Google have, in their typical roundabout manner, said that their search engines need to increase the accuracy  of search documents. There is belief that once a user clicks and visits s landing page, Google uses this information to then improve the SERPs. This is incase that query is asked again.

As such, the activities provided by AdWords results can offer Google information. They can then, in turn, use this to gauge the accuracy of pages pertaining to a specific query.

So what’s the truth – Is the absence of Adword adverse to your SEO?

Google clearly needs a rational way of working out quality and relevance, and makes no real secret of gathering as much information as possible to achieve this. Feeding their data back into the process this way would certainly be one of them being able to do so.

Another simple benefit that an AdWords account can bring is quite simply visibility. Regardless of a click or not, the more page real estate you’re taking up, the greater the number of opportunities to see you’re providing the potential end users. Marketing 101 right there.

This doesn’t mean simply having an AdWords account linked to a particular property is going to boost you top the top spot, but a well-performing AdWords account could well be feeding Google vital information as to the quality and relevancy of your page. It might just be time for SEO’s to stop turning the noses up at the opportunities paid search can offer…