How Might Ads be Hurting Your Website SEO

In a world where technology is advancing by the second, advertisements have become increasingly pervasive. Technologies such as targeted ads make them more effective than ever before and businesses are embracing this trend. Unfortunately, not everyone stops to consider whether or not these ads can be detrimental to their website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Advertising may help your website generate revenue, but if it harms your SEO performance you could end up suffering from decreased web traffic and fewer conversions. In this post, we’ll discuss the different types of online advertisements and how these may have an impact on your website’s SEO. Different Types of Online Advertisements Online advertisements come in many different forms. One of the most common types is Pay Per Click (PPC). With PPC, advertisers pay for each click on their advertisement. This type of advertising is a great way to reach potential customers quickly and efficiently. Advertisers can target specific audiences by using keywords related to their product or service, as well as setting up geographical boundaries for who can view their ad. This ensures that only people who are more likely to purchase their product or service see the advertisement, resulting in a higher return on investment. Another popular type of online advertisement is banner ads. These are typically rectangular images, videos or text boxes which appear on websites, usually at the top or side of the page. Banner ads can be used to direct users to an advertiser’s website, or they can contain a call to action such as downloading an app or signing up for a service. These ads are designed to grab the user’s attention and prompt them to take some kind of action. Social media advertisements are also becoming increasingly popular. This type of advertising allows advertisers to target very specific audiences based on their interests, location, age, gender, and more. Advertisers can craft creative and highly engaging campaigns that will capture the attention of their intended audience and drive conversions. How Might Ads be Hurting Your Website SEO Online ads may appear to be an effective way to bring in more traffic and revenue, but they can actually hurt your website’s Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). While it is true that paid search ads are the most visible form of online advertising, they also consume a large portion of valuable resources such as bandwidth, server space, and loading speed; which, under Google’s core web vitals assessment (a gauge of how functional a site is and how good a user experience it provides) may lead to a site being ranked lower than it’s more optimised counterparts. It may seem logical that more advertisements on a website will result in more profit for the site owners. But this is not always true, especially when considering the long term. While more ads will increase short-term revenue, they can slow down the site’s performance by way of additional resource calls, uncompressed image downloads and unnecessary scripting which adds a considerable amount of page weight. Online ads contain a great deal of code which can interfere with SEO. A majority of online ad networks serve advertisements using JavaScript or Flash-based scripts which must be loaded every time someone visits your site. This means that search engine crawlers have to work harder to understand the content of your website, which in turn can negatively affect indexing, and ranking while increasing the bounce rate. This holds true even when ads such as Google AdSense are loaded in the background. Another issue may arise when using third-party ad networks. Many sites are unaware that these networks may be selling their web traffic data or sharing it with other companies without their permission. This can lead to irrelevant and intrusive advertisements on your site which could put visitors off from visiting again in the future. Not only that, but some ad networks even place redirects on websites which can link back to an inappropriate source. In order for search engines to deem a website as reputable, they must be able to rely on it to provide a safe and quality user experience. Burn rates in a website design refer to how quickly users are becoming uninterested in a website, mostly due to the effects of advertising. This includes factors such as slow loading speeds, intrusive ad placement, blocking vital content and intrusive auto-playing videos. All these have led to a growing desire to utilise ad blockers. Page Fair and Adobe released a report that shows how much global revenue was lost due to blocked ads in 2015 reaching an amount of $21.8B. Finally, ads can lead to an over-commercialised site that fails to provide valuable content. Search engine algorithms are designed to favour websites with original and informative content, so if your website is filled with ads instead of useful information then it is unlikely you will rank highly on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Visitors may avoid your website due to its lack of quality and may become annoyed by the constant barrage of advertisements. There’s nothing wrong with using ads within your website, in fact – may site owners look specifically to develop a captive online audience in order to earn passive income from their website. It can be easy, however, to implement too many ads or to do so incorrectly which may have the adverse effect. If you’re not sure how to build your own ad solution, get help from a professional at Odyssey New Media.

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