Does Being a Google Advertiser Give an Advantage in the Rankings?

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Transcript of the Video...

All right, hi everyone and welcome to our Search Engine News SEO Q&A. My name is Casey Markee and I'm the Lead SEO Consultant and Head of on-line support with Search Engine News and Planet Ocean. If you've used our paid Fast Track Service or submitted a request for SEO assistance, or even scheduled a professional consultation with Search Engine News you've probably had some contact with myself or my learned associate, John Heard.

We get some pretty interesting questions asked of us from time to time both during the course of SEO support or doing client SEO consultations or just what we've run across in our daily dealings, and one of our long-time subscribers, Al, actually recently submitted a question which we thought was pretty interesting and so we're going to go ahead and answer that for you today, do something a little bit different, put it on video and see what you guys think.

Al asks, "I have three competitors who are currently outranking me in Google. All three of them are just above me and I can't seem to unseed them. One of the few threads that connect them to each other is that they all advertise on Google AdWords and I don't. Are they getting an Organic ranking boost from being a Google advertiser?"

This is a pretty interesting question and it's one that we actually get asked often. I just recently attended the Pubcon Paradise. This was something that a lot of people asked. This was also something that we occasionally get asked by other SEO's and of course on-line support like with Al here.

I think we can definitively say that advertising with Google does not give you any direct organic ranking benefit. However, I'm going to preface that by saying that with most things with SEO there is a however, and we're going to get into the 'however' part of that later on in the answer.

But basically Google does not give you any direct Organic ranking benefit from advertising with Google AdWords. Google goes to great lengths to keep the paid and the Organic sides of their business entirely separate and this is to ensure that there is no funny business involved at all, period.

And if you think about it, be it Al or anyone else listening on th...