are premium wordpress themes better for seo

I want to create a few sites for a specific niche, one for local, one for US, and maybe more. For this niche I have a found a really awesome theme. For whatever reason, I could really only find one good theme though. If I use this same theme for all of my websites, is that bad for seo? Furthermore, will a theme that has been used by a ton of people hurt seo, is it better to go with premium themes that maybe less people have used? I guess I don't even know if google recognizes themes.

sorry if this is a dumb question or has already been covered, I am sure it has. It is a hard thing to search for because all I get for results are people selling themes or web design service lol!

I think that depends on the theme. You could always ask the creator of the theme, but usually they have pretty good SEO, wordpress in general has that.

Nope.

thank you folks, on with my work then...

Not necessarily would be the correct answer

While this is really picking on the little things, with free themes you can always have the problem of it not being correctly SEO'd. Personally I only run WP sites with "free premium themes" and they've all been awesome - as long as one just does the customization of the SEO to fit their needs. The key thing is that with premium theme you're paying for the person to tailor the SEO for your site/niche, whereas a free theme makes might have left it all out for you to configure the way you want.

As far as I have experienced I don't think Google give more priority to the premium theme and less priority to other. SO if you are planning to choose one theme for your all blog or website that would be more user friendly and also easy to manage for you.....even the top seo expert los angeles recommends the same...

No, it's up to you to work on the SEO. Some themes claim to be optimized for SEO though, but I don't know the details.

No. Some premium themes are loaded with features and tons of javascript that they slow down your site. This will hurt your ranking rather than help it.

And if those premium themes are designed by those who know about SEO, then of course, they are optimized. Otherwise, there's no guarantee. A free theme designer who knows SEO can beat premium themes, but the design is more commonly used.