Common Search Marketing Myths – Part 6 | Varn

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1 December 2017

Common Search Marketing Myths – Part 6: How PPC Affects Organic Search, the Death of Bing and More

Paying for PPC affects my organic position

A common myth within the SEO community is that paid advertising has a direct impact on organic rankings. Many believe that search engines such as Google secretly reward users who pay for advertising by also boosting their organic results. However, Google, Bing and other search engines have purposefully implemented measures to prevent just that. When an optimised website climbs within organic search, it’s likely to also perform better within paid search as improved SEO will typically also help increase your page quality score. But the two aren’t directly related. The best thing to do in order to improve your PPC and organic rankings is to ensure your website and ads are as optimised as they can be. If you need help with this, do not hesitate to contact the SEO professionals at Varn. We offer a variety of SEO audit packages to suit your business.

Bing is DEAD

More than 80% of people searching online use Google, compared to less than 15% who use Microsoft (Bing and Yahoo!). Can we therefore assume that Bing is no longer relevant within the world of search? Not necessarily. Whilst Bing’s share of search was only around 11% back in July 2017, this percentage has been slowly increasing over the past 2+ years. With only 6.96% of search back in January 2015, Bing’s market share is definitely climbing (albeit rather slowly). In the same period, Google’s market share has dropped from 88.22% to 83.49% whilst Yahoo’s share hasn’t changed much at all. So despite popular belief, it seems as though Bing is very much alive and kicking – making it more important than ever to ensure your website is optimised for a number of search engines, not just Google!

People only click on organic Google results

Since the creation of Google AdWords, there have been many debates over whether or not people actually click on paid ads within Google search results. Varn have carried out original research which shows that, not only do users click on paid ads, the majority of people aren’t actually aware of the difference between paid and organic Google results. Almost 60% of people surveyed were unable to distinguish between the two – an increase of 16.4% since the same research was initially carried out by Varn 18 months ago. Take a look at our original research here:
VARN Original Research: You Won’t Believe How Many People Don’t Recognise Paid Ads in Google.
That’s it for another instalment in our Search Marketing Myths blog series! If you haven’t already, do make sure you check in on our previous blogs within this series: Part 1: Exact Match Domains, Backlinks and Google / Part 2: Meta Tags, H1 Headings and Google AdWords / Part 3: Ongoing SEO, Website Hosting and Mobile Optimisation / Part 4: Disavowing Backlinks, Outbound Links and AdWords Bidding / Part 5: Keyword Targeting, Guest Blogging and Changing Domain.

See you next time!

Article by: Aimee, Head of Innovation More articles by Aimee

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