I recently had a prospective client e-mail me saying, “Several weeks after launching my PPC campaign, my organic rankings dropped. What happened?!”

Well, without looking at the site, I have no idea. And even then, it will only be an educated best guess. The short answer is that the site did something to offend Googlebot. Whether or not the site owner knew he did it, he did. And it could be anything from linking out to a bad neighborhood to getting overzealous with on-page keyword placement, or anything in between.

The problem is that the question was framed all wrong to begin with. The question implies that the launch of the PPC campaign somehow impacted the site’s organic rankings. Well, it did not. One has nothing to do with the other. Sort of.

There is an SEO/PPC connection. One that should be appreciated and not feared. The fact is that Web pages that are optimzed for organic rankings will tend to garner better quality scores for their associated PPC ads.

Pay-per-click ads are ranked on the page by three main criteria: your bid price, your click through rate, and the overall quality score. The quality score is based on the relevance between the keyword, ad copy and ad landing page.

So let’s move through this logically…

Step one is to identify a profitable keyword. One that has appropriate measures of traffic and competition, and also is further along in the buying cycle as it will tend to convert better.

Step two is to build a page that is all about that particular keyword. We’ll use the consistency principle to build the page, making sure to include our profitable keyword in all the important on page elements.

After the page is created, make sure it is linked into your site logically, keeping it inside the appropriate “theme” within your site. And of course, seek out non-competitive but relevant backlinks to this page, using anchor text that matches your targeted keyword.

Step three is to create an Adgroup specifically targeted to the same keyword. The ad copy will contain the keyword and you’ll be bidding on variations of that keyword including broad, phrase and exact matching options.

One one hand, you’ll have a page that is optimzed for a profitable keyword and is in a position to rank well organically. On the other, you’ll have an Adgroup that will enjoy a high quality score based on the laser-targeted relevance between the keyword, ad copy, and landing page.

In this regard, SEO and PPC are connected. However, not in the way the aforementioned prospect thought. While merely running ads will have no effect on your ability to rank organically, a well-optimized site will tend to garner high quality scores if the ads are appropriately matched to the optimized pages. There is a connection afterall.