Does Advertising In AdWords Help In SEO?

One question that largely keeps popping up in advertisers’ minds is ‘does advertising in AdWords help in SEO?’ i.e.  having paid few bucks to Google by subscribing to its AdWords ad platform, does your ranking on Google’s search page take a rise?

Well, cropping up of this doubt is logical because both the AdWords and Google Search belong to the undisputed champion of search and digital ads, Google.However, by resorting to any such fishy activity, Google is bound to only lose reputation that it has built over the years. Google’s ad network’s sheer size and its heavy dependency on AdWords for its revenues in itself is reason enough to believe Google’s claim of keeping Google search transparent and unadulterated.

Understand Google Search Result Page

Google’s Adwords however makes your advertised site visible when searching on Google, but only clearly displaying it as ads. However, it does not increase your rankings in the normal search category.

The screen shot above is that of a Google search page which basically consists of three sections. If you just pay a little attention to the left side of the page, you will notice the top two searches are highlighted in a dull pink background and annotated with the text “Ads related to ….”

This indicates that it is an advertisement section and the top two highlighted links appear there because they have been advertised on AdWords. The links appear right at the top because the advertised keywords are found highly relevant to the searched keywords.

Does AdWords Help in SEO?

Now pan to the right side of the screen shot and you will notice a narrow column of links related to the search. This whole column is meant for advertised links. To indicate the same you can see the annotation “Ads” at the top of the column. These ads are however less relevant to the keywords and so appear in this separate ads column.

What Google means with transparent and unbiased search result is the result in the left side of the page below the advertised links. This is where SEO plays the trick to rank your page higher than others. Google however doesn’t play around with these results whether you have advertised in AdWords or not. It ranks the pages entirely based on its search algorithm which depends largely on the number of hits pages receive and relevance and frequency of content posted.

SEO helps you to increase the relevance of content on your page. By correctly placing keywords in your page and aligning headers and meta-content with the searched keywords, SEO can help to increase the page rank in Google’s search algorithm.However, Google keeps modifying its search algorithm at regular intervals to normalize these SEO efforts and so any kind of SEO cannot for long beat Google in its own game.

Google’s AdWords and search together form the biggest pie of its revenues and thus it does not make any sense for Google to malign its reputation as a fair search engine and ad platform by giving irrelevant biased results. You go to Google search because you find what you are looking for. If that fact doesn’t hold true, the monopoly it enjoys will be lost in no time.

The answer to the question ‘does advertising in AdWords help in SEO?’ therefore is that while advertising on AdWords can make your links visible in the ad sections of the search result, it surely does not help in SEO as far as the normal search results are concerned.