How much does using adwords help SEO?

[aygabtu]

I have been using adwords for a month now for one of my sites and losing money everyday. My hope is that it will help with SEO, with google seeing decent stats from visitors and hopefully have a fraction actually bookmark or create a backlink to the site, etc. Unfortunately I don't think I am getting any real organic traffic yet.

How much SEO benefit do you think sites get doing this and how much would you allow yourself to lose per day/month?

[petzergling]

I don't think advertising on adwords really helps SEO that much. Adwords is a very lucrative industry where its very easy to track and make changes and where alot of people arent very good -- if you have an adword campaign that isnt making money you should really just learn how to use adwords (or consider changing your niche :P) . Google knows that they are paid advertisements so paying for google adwords clicks isnt getting you PR9/10 backlinks or whatever you think its doing.

If you really want to combine ppc and SEO, you should do some research and find high PR blogs in your niche that advertise, and contact the site owner and offer for a banner ad on their page. That way you are getting targeted traffic from their viewers, and you are also paying for a high PR backlink on a homepage.

[ukcarl]

The only way PPC can possibly help SEO is by figuring out which keywords are converting, that way you can target them with SEO.

Are you tracking properly?

[aygabtu]

I am doing a Web 2.0 site and the number of keywords is too numerous to target just a handful. I know adwords in itself doesn't raise PR or SERP, but having visitors come to the site compared to no one visiting has to make some kind of difference. If I can drive 100's of people to my site per day and just 5-10 of those create some kind of link or share the site with someone else, that becomes pretty good overtime, generating natural backlinks, right?

Also, when people visit a site, doesn't it start appear on the first page of their personal SERP for related searches?

As far as tracking conversions, I only get about 10 conversions per day according to adwords. That is with 100's of keyword combinations, so there is not 1, 2, or even 10 keywords that are better than others. It is too scattered.

I started the adwords campaign for one goal. To drive traffic to the site and hope that it will, in time, raise my SERP results and generate organic traffic. At the same time I hoped that the ad revenue I got would eventually be greater than the adwords cost. At the same time I am doing my own backlinking, on-page and off-page SEO, etc.

So far though, I continue to lose money daily. I also don't know what kind of organic traffic I am truly getting right now either. I could turn off the ad campaign for a day and see what happens.

One concern I have is perhaps google is slow to raise me in the SERPs because I am paying them for ads. If I was getting decent organic traffic I wouldn't be paying them for ads, so that revenue stream would dry up. One site wouldn't be a concern for them, but they probably handle 10's of thousands of people in my situation.

Thoughts?

[Tmill]

I don't believe adwords would help your sites SEO at all. I have never tested this though. Would like to see some results

[Jon Potts]

I believe Google takes whatever information it has available and uses it some way or another... PPC tells Google whether targeted traffic got the result they wanted from your page or if they bounced out and clicked another result if it is done through Adwords. This is just opinion though.

In order for it to have a real impact however you would need to have a lot of traffic generated from the PPC. I am positive traffic helps you rank.

[zabalex]

If you decided to spend some money better you invest it in some great content in the form of informative and helpful articles. Publish this article on your site and spread this through the social media like digg and stumbleupon or facebook and twitter. If the article is really too helpful for your visitors in any way they will sure give you a back link or spread this to their friends.

Adwords in no way can give you any benefit if you really don't track the most converting keywords. The amount you are spending in adwords can be used to educate your visitors through the articles and blogs. Better spend your hard earned money in something constructive if you are not getting what you expected from the PPC.

Or simply hire someone who can handle your PPC and generate conversion through it. PPC also requires an analysis that can save your CPC and increase your CTR and conversion. Generally people choose to target the most competitive keywords and those keywords gets a high CPC, you can use some moderate search term to see the result and stop all high CPC keywords.

[FrankRumbauskas]

Using AdWords will not help SEO. Despite all the rubbish conspiracy theories you hear on this and other forums, spending money with Google really will not do anything for your SEO ranking.

However, AdWords is very useful for determining what keywords convert the best and therefore will be best for SEO. I have arguments with affiliates all the time because they SEO for the "obvious" keywords but in reality it's really unusual and unexpected keywords that generate conversions.

One final thought: While AdWords will not help with SEO, SEO does seem to help with AdWords. Though Google won't confirm it, sites with strong SEO rankings for relevant keywords tend to get better return-on-investment in AdWords.