SEO Mentality - Build pages/sites/blogs/whatever to rank highly in search engines and ultimately have free traffic driving sales. This is awesome of course, free traffic coming steadily, who doesnt want it right? Of course with SEO you are on a time factor. Back in the day, some will remember when I ran my SEO firm. At that time I was not involved much with paid traffic. At the time I personally felt that optimizing for search engines was the best way to get traffic. Ultimately it is probably considered the best and a long-term way for residual traffic but their is something I want to express to a lot of people who go down the SEO route.
Once I got involved with paid traffic I started coming to the realization that I was spending a ton of resources and time in developing content for sites that mainly was filler. Had I took a step back and looked at the scope of things I would have figured out that if I had ran a PPC or another paid traffic campaign to some quickly built blogs and landing pages I would have determined profitable keywords.
The whole time I was spent concentrating on SEO allowed me to build a lot of crap that mainly did no good for me other than produce pages of content that could potentially bring visitors to my site and allow them to navigate to maybe one of my pages that has keywords that potentially pull in the sales.
The point is this:
While SEO can potentially bring you sales and long-term traffic, I much prefer to run quickly setup paid traffic campaigns. This allows me to generate keywords with data that helps me determine whether they are even worth building a long-term site/blog/pages around. If you run a paid traffic campaign you can get results in minutes/hours/days and you will also already know what type of text along with those keywords produces sales. Doing it this way allows you to already have a good idea on how to properly write your pages that you definitely would like to be rank.
11 Comments Received
January 2nd, 2009 @1:48 pm
Absolutely agree with you. I wasted a lot of time doing SEO, ranking for the keywords I wanted just to watch all of the traffic bounce without making me a dime.
PPC is the way to go to get data and find opportunities for SEO.
In addition… people who click on ads are in the “buying” mode, while people who click on organic tend to be in the research mode.
P.S. Hope I run into some of you guys at Affiliate Summit
January 2nd, 2009 @2:23 pm
I strongly disagree. I believe affiliates should be involved in both PPC and SEO. SEO is NEEDED for long-term success and recurring income. It’s not safe concentrating on just PPC, it doesn’t matter who you are.
January 2nd, 2009 @2:51 pm
Bingo!!
So many people embark on SEO with keywords they suspect will be the killers, but they don’t know for sure. Once they’ve tried PPC they can say for sure not only which keywords are golden, but they can also work on their Titles and descriptions based on best performing ads.
Add into that if you run content targeted ads and get traffic and/or good results it might lead to a call to the owner of the site for a direct media buy with some link love being passed your way.
You can get good data for SEO inside a few days for a PPC campaign, but SEO could take many months to rank for the words, only to find they were not the winners.
January 2nd, 2009 @5:11 pm
@Kiley - I have the feeling you misunderstood the post. Not once did I say not to be involved in both. The point of the whole post is I would rather build something quick and easy to test the market and buy my traffic for immediate data that will enable me to decide whether I should put more effort into actually creating a long-term website and if by doing so I cut the chase of building crap pages that doesn’t provoke a buy process.
Another point of the post is to NOT concentrate solely PPC but use it for the quickest results enabling you to build pages/sites the fastest with buy keywords and text. Whats the point of building webpages with keywords you dont know will convert into sales or not? Fun?
@Jim - I agree completely. Pure madness to build webpages on whim as a marketer. If you dont have data backing your decisions to build webpages then your either uneducated in Internet business or you just like to build pages for the heck of it. Personally I like to make the most out of my time online so I will stick to building pages around keywords that have converted into sales.
@ Everyone - I would love to hear some challenges from marketers who build pages without any real data that aids them in creating pages that actually make money. I know you can do it, but how long does it really take? Is your time worth the effort? Probably but how long down the road? Building 10,000 pages into a website dont make much sense if only 5 of those pages make money. I guess the other 9,995 pages are just used as a funnel into hopefully driving people to those pages that sale. That’s madness.
1 million searches a month and ranking in Google on the first page within days or weeks dont mean shit if it doesnt make you money. Good for bragging rights I guess but then again the only people who would be impressed are probably in the same mindset.
January 2nd, 2009 @6:28 pm
And 100% right that you do both. Why pay for it only if you can get it for free?
It’s like lotto tickets.
One paid ad = 1/20 chance of a win.
One paid ad and one organic = 1/10 chance of win.
Two paid ad and one organic = Subject of another post maybe, black hat PPC!
January 2nd, 2009 @7:38 pm
@Ruck
Yes, I see, I did in fact misunderstand the post. I see what you are talking about now. Apologies.
January 2nd, 2009 @8:12 pm
No probs man. I went back and reread it myself to make sure I didnt make a mistake. All cleared up though. Good stuff.
January 2nd, 2009 @9:24 pm
I totally agree with you on this as well, you just can’t beat how quickly you can get valuable information back from your ppc campaigns.
I do have around 7 sites that do great organically, but they took a lot of damn work. It was definitely worth it though as now I can use that cash to fund my ppc campaigns.
January 4th, 2009 @3:53 pm
Nice post, I’m about to launch some new campaigns and I’ll bear this in mind.
January 6th, 2009 @6:59 am
This is a post that I really needed to read. Back in the day of PPC arbi I was a PPC master of 7Search, but now I have no skillz.
Recently I made a decent buck by ranking high for acai thanks to SEO, but I bet I could have doubled revenue if I’d used PPC too. Don’t get me wrong, I thought about it, I researched it, but I never took the time to actually implement a set of campaigns. This post will help to push me to the other side… I must investigate PPC again.
January 7th, 2009 @5:10 pm
In the wise words of shoemoney, “SEO IS GAY”
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