If you cut off your Google Ads campaigns, is your website going to drop?
SEO CONSPIRACY S01E18
Honestly, there are several reasons to answer no to the question “Will I drop in the organic ranking if I cut off my Adwords?”.
First, simply because Google keeps on saying that there is no mathematical correlation between organic and paid.
Secondly, if it’s proven to be, then Google will have to fight another core case in the European courts because it would mean that they are using their market share in a monopolistic way. I think that Google strives not to have these two walls, Paid & Organic integrated, but here’s the thing:
When the results come back, Google is making determinations as to how much paid content they can give you and, indeed, the amount of paid content that’s showing up on the SERPs; it has increased dramatically over the years.
If you can be found on the organic result on the first page from any searches; you’re doing well because there’s not a lot of them.
And that has a long-term impact. That does shift the power of a brand who’s got money to influence the mindsets of the individual. The mindset of the individual will have an increased propensity to click on an organic result if they recognize the brand. Therefore, it’s a case of the tail wagging the dog.
If you’ve got a brand then you’re much more likely to get the click; if you haven’t got a brand, then it’s because you haven’t done the paid stuff because Google blocks the organic results.
So you have to build a brand, and you may have to pay to build that brand.
So, mathematically, no, there is no correlation, but brands have a built-in advantage because of the weight that they can put behind the paid campaign.
But the reason for your drop in traffic can be just because you suddenly stopped your campaigns.
The agitation, the signal stopped. It was humongous; it stopped, and then Google might see it as a weakness.
Also, SEOs are often misreading their Google Analytics, and they see traffic from Google, and then they associate that with organic traffic when it was paid traffic. So you cut off the paid traffic, and you see a drop in what you think is your organic traffic because you do not understand the raw data in your analytics.
Google Adwords Planner
Back in the days, a bunch of people were using the AdWords planner API’s to estimate organic traffic.
All of a sudden, Google decided only to allow the use of the AdWords planner for paid campaigns.
So they blocked everybody from using the AdWords planner for estimating keyword volume. They banned a whole load of SEO tools or took away the API.
Now that was a case of these two technologies; the paid vs the organic coming together and blending.
Google can’t separate Paid & Organic because there’s only one page of results, and they blend these things in, so there are technologies that cross those divides.
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