I have been running adwords campaigns for my site for several years and have a quality score of 10 on most landing pages / keywords and a good healthy CTR. The SEO for the site though is poor.
I have an opportunity to purchase a competitor's site that has good seo and no adwords activity.
My questions are:
a) Can I run the old site as my adwords site (perhaps put a block on the site being indexed in natural search) to keep on benefiting from good CPC etc. and run the new site in tandem to benefit from SEO only. Would I be penalised by google for this?
b) If I chose to just use the high ranked seo site and transferred the domain names on all my adwords accounts (to point to the seo site) how badly would this affect quality scores etc (if the content levels are broadly similar). Would I be able to achieve the same CPC levels as with the old site and if so how long would this process take?
Many thanks in advance for any advice
a) Can I run the old site as my adwords site (perhaps put a block on the site being indexed in natural search) to keep on benefiting from good CPC etc. and run the new site in tandem to benefit from SEO only. Would I be penalised by google for this?
No, you won't be penalized, and you won't be filtered, as long as you do block the site from being indexed. You want it to be crawled (the AdWords bot has to be able to see it) but you want NOINDEX on all the pages. However, if branding is important to you, you may have an issue running your business on two separate urls.
b) If I chose to just use the high ranked seo site and transferred the domain names on all my adwords accounts (to point to the seo site) how badly would this affect quality scores etc (if the content levels are broadly similar). Would I be able to achieve the same CPC levels as with the old site and if so how long would this process take?
Nobody can say for sure. You might want to test it with just one page or offer or product, and see what happens. You will lose your history, but if you were doing everything right in the first place, hopefully you'll recover pretty quickly (maybe a few weeks or months while Google is re-evaluating your site) but no guarantees. That's why I'd test it on one thing first.
