PPC seems to have had a seriously negative impact on organic rankings?!?
-
We've been targeting a keyword on behalf of a client for the last few months. The page had good content and had been steadily climbing the rankings.
It reached a position of #12 and then suddenly dropped off. Within 2 weeks it was out of the top 50 and is now around the 10th or 11th page (useless).
This drop off matched exactly with the cleint switching on a low level PPC campaign, driving traffic from this specific keyword. The stats on this have shown a really high bounce rate (so we'll need to ask some other questions about content) - but could this be the reason that organic stats have taken a hammering?
If Google associated people landing n that page from that keyword (even though its paid) as not finding relevant content, I'm assuming this could have a negative impact on the organic rank?
Any Thoughts Welcome....!!!
-
Here's the thing, you have 2 referring domains pointing to this page and one of them is pointing to it 298 times using the anchor text "penetration hosting" *(which I'm assuming is the keyword you are being penalized for.)
That's no good. BUT totally recoverable. If those links are internal, there are several things that can be done but the domains should be more important. Build some content, gain some natural links and make sure the anchor text is varied. This should happen on it's own if these links are built organically.
Build organic to gain organic.
-
This is my guess as well. I'd be dollars to donuts that your drop in ranking happened somewhere around October 5th.
Can you confirm or deny that via GA?
-
Hmm. I'm doubtful that a PPC campaign would knock you down like that in the organic results. When did the drop happen? Google has done several updates in the past few weeks, including a Penguin update, that may have happened at the same time. I noticed that in Open Site Explorer you only have two "external" sites linking to the page, cnsmosaic and cnsgroup. From the links on the hut3 site, I'm assuming these are all part of the same company.
It's possible, however, that Google sees the links from those sites as external links. Since it would appear that the links to the penetration testing page are sitewide accross the cns sites, I wonder if Google is treating those as external sitewide links, all with targeted keywords, and has penalized you for it, either manually or by algorithm.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com -
My guess is the google algorithm updates happen to coincide with your lower ppc budgeting.
-
Thanks Tuzzel, feel free to have a look.
The Page is http://www.hut3.net/security-assessment/penetration-testing - and until a few weeks ago was climbing the ranks on the 'Penetration Testing' keyword.
Child Pages of Internal and External Penetration testing were also ranking in the top 3 of their respective terms (although search volumes are much lower).
-
While bounce rate and page engagement would play a role i'd be surprised if this was solely down to the PPC campaign, particuarly if its low level as you mention. Whats the URL of the problem page and we may be able to case more light on the matter / offer alternate potential areas to investigate.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Are there any recent studies of organic CTR vs. PPC CTR?
Pretty much the title. I am putting together a "game plan" for my CEO, where I would like to touch on the difference in CTR between SERP organic results and SERP PPC results. I've found a few blog posts that talks about PPC being responsible for 15% of all clicks, where 1-5 organic results are responsible for 68ish % and the rest being on 6-10 and page 2/3. However, I do not see any sources in these articles, which begs the question, where are these numbers taken from? Any suggestions? My own gut feeling (and SERP behaviour) tells me that these numbers might actually be super accurate, but since my business plan will most likely end up in the hands of our board of directors, I would very much like to back up my action points for growth, with actual sources. Thanks in advance.
Paid Search Marketing | | Nikolaj-Landrock1 -
Negative keywords on AdWords account, but mispelling in customer query still triggers ad. Possible to avoid?
Ok, So this really p*#%d me off the other day. I've built an extremely comprehensive list of Negative keywords for our trade bookbinding pages on Ad words. Amongst 100's of others, I've also included every City, Town, Village, and County in the UK so our Ads don't get triggered by local search intent. However, we're still getting clicks from searches like this one: **'binding services n worcestr' ** Question: If Google won't assume this is a misspelling of one of our Neg KW, how I can I possibly protect the account from this type of search? Is this something we just have to accept having KW's on broad match mod/ phrase match?
Paid Search Marketing | | isaac6631 -
I am already ranking top
i saw advice that even if you are already top in the serp you should anyways buy the google ads for it. it doesnt seem to make any sense to me can anyone explain it to me??? thanx
Paid Search Marketing | | Ruchy0 -
Our PPC UTM URLs Aren't Registering In GA Properly
Hi, We recently ran a few ads on Facebook and Reddit for a campaign of ours. Each of the URLs were properly attributed UTM links. Some of them register properly in campaigns, but the vast majority aren't. I can only find the attribution by checking All Traffic and displaying the landing page and the source/medium. Our Facebook Ad Manager reports MANY more clicks than our Campaign section in GA is for the campaign name. Here's the URL I receive for the landing page: /?url=http://www.ourwebsiteurl.com/our-landing-page?utm_source=facebook.com&dm_redirected=true Is Facebook writing over our UTM with their own so all I receive is that it came from Facebook? The URL we used was complete with utm_source, utm_campaign and utm_medium, yet these aren't fully reported. Any ideas?
Paid Search Marketing | | kirmeliux0 -
Canonical or noindex for PPC landing pages?
I have two pages for this example. http://www.designquotes.com.au/web-design-quotes/ http://www.designquotes.com.au/web-design-quotes-melbourne/ The first URL is an SEO optimised page. The second URL is 99% the same, except that it specifies a city. It's intended use of for a PPC campaign. The first page has major cities mentioned on the page so I don't have to build a separate page for every city variation. The second URL is designed to be city specific for a geographically targeted PPC campaign. The more specific, the higher the conversion rate. Should the second page (the PPC landing page) use a canonical URL (since it's 99% the same) or should it be noindex?
Paid Search Marketing | | designquotes0 -
Has anyone seen a recent study on % of clicks on Adwords vs Organic results?
HI, I am trying to find out what percentage of people click on organic search results on Google versus the percentage of people who click on advertisements. I have found many references online to studies that supposedly say 70-80% of clicks go to organic results and the rest go to ads, but I have never seen an actual study claiming this, let alone a recent one. Can anyone help? many thanks in advance, Annemieke
Paid Search Marketing | | AnnemiekevH0 -
Does anyone have a good resource for learning PPC?
Hi guys I'm looking for a good resource to brush up on PPC. Any help would be great. Thanks
Paid Search Marketing | | flemingsteele0 -
Does increased adwords traffic boost your search engines rankings?
Does paying for 1cent low quality clicks give you more traffic that can be used to increase your search engine rankings?
Paid Search Marketing | | nutworkweb0