Does on page SEO help or hurt PPC ranking?

[sherrieb]

Hi,

I am working with a local client doing SEO work for him. I got him on page one for one of his keywords where the service he was using previously never got him past page 3. He is also using reachlocal ppc.

He is not ranking high in the PPC and reachlocal is telling him it's because of his new website. They claim it's not optimized for certain keywords and that is why the PPC rank is down. It is true the site is not optimized for their particular keywords, but neither was his old site. The site I built and ranked for him has more content than his previous site, and is at #6 for his main keyword phrase.

I'm not familiar with PPC, is it true that the on page SEO can hurt or help PPC ranking? I thought PPC was all about the bid. I'm skeptical due to the fact that the previous site had no optimization for these words either.

Any thoughts are welcome.

[DynaPass]

It is true that they could rank higher for the keyword by just pumping more money into the bid although the cost of the bid is higher if the quality score is lower. However if the site is ranking good for SEO the quality score cant be that bad.

Sometimes though, SEO does not mean better quality score for PPC.

[Targeted Traffic]

There are many ways in which SEO and PPC efforts complement each other, and lead to a more successful search strategy.The most obvious benefit of combining SEO and PPC efforts is added exposure on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Also one is that you can use best performing PPC Ad Copy to inform your organic content strategy.

[C Rebecca]

On page factors does not hurt PPC ranking, but on page factors may contribute in making and breaking leads.

As far as PPC is concerned, you bid for a keyword and the highest bidder gets the highest rank in the sponsored listing.

If your website is not optimized for that keyword, still you may get the position by bidding highest in the search results. But if you are getting wrong traffic, you are paying for irrelevant clicks and even not getting the leads.

[Joe Micheal]

Both are effective and necessary for web marketing strategy. For example, if you have technical errors, poor contents, irrelevant page titles, credibility issues, insufficient internal links and improper site navigation etc. do you think it attracts your targeted customers coming via PPC campaign?

IMO it will be nothing but mismanagement of your cash and poor marketing planning.

[Cosmit]

It's not all about the bid. Have you ever done PPC? There's a thing called quality score (Adwords at least).

The search-engine system calculates the quality score on the basis of historical click-through rates, relevance of an advertiser's ad text and keywords, an advertiser's account history, and other relevance factors as determined by Google. The quality score is also used by Google to set the minimum bids for an advertiser's keywords. The minimum bid takes into consideration the quality of the landing page as well, which includes the relevancy and originality of content, navigability, and transparency into the nature of the business. Though Google has released a list of full guidelines for sites, the precise formula and meaning of relevance and its definition is in part secret to Google and the parameters used can change dynamically.