The World’s Most Expensive Free SEO?
Have you given paid traffic due consideration?
Although I didn’t end up buying Traffic Crusher I discussed in my last post, I do think that paid traffic is something that every serious online entrepreneur should look into. In fact, I have a feeling that many of us are so hung up on traditional SEO – ranking at the very top of Google that is – that we actually end up paying through our nose for all of that “free” traffic.
Maybe some of that dough might have been better spent using a good advertising system such as Google Adwords?
For example; I just came back from reading yet another sales letter on yet another “ultimate natural search results booster” piece of software/strategy. I won’t go into any details about this particular offering, but I’ll say that it cost $137 a month and my quick take away of it is that it probably isn’t half as effective as is claimed on the sales letter. Basically it was a collection of various techniques of spamming social sites with RSS feeds and whatnot. (Indeed, many Blackhats consider RSS as an acronym of “Really Simple Spamming”)
So if you used this service for six months you’d end up spending 822 dollars, without necessarily having gotten anything concrete in return for your money. Yes, your links may be appearing all over the place – but if that doesn’t lead to traffic that is actually producing conversions and sales for you, that doesn’t account for anything. In a worst case scenario, your spammed links may even be frowned upon by Google by now.
Or as one of the guys from Stompernet put it:
Some people are actually ranking in spite of their SEO efforts, not because of them.
So if we then imagine that you spent that same 822 dollars on Adwords instead. Let’s also theoretically assume that you wound up paying 0,50 cents per click, which would have given you 1 644 clicks for your ads.
If we further play with the idea that you have a sales funnel well optimized enough so that 1% of those visitors received through your PPC campaign actually bought your product and that you earn $50 per item sold – you actually would have produced 16,44 sales for a total of 822 dollars.
In other words you broke even.
Now, before you grab me by the throat or something, I realize there are many assumptions and variables that could look way differently than in the example. And it is also entirely possible to spend hundreds of dollars on Adwords without producing a single conversion.
But the fact remains that results like in the above example certainly are very attainable, if you learn to set up and optimize both your Adwords campaigns and your landing pages well enough. With even more tweaking and testing you will eventually be making profits (those who really know what they are doing usually have the goal set at a 100% Return On Investment) from your advertising, and if you have your business set up in order to make repeat sales those little ads will have done way more than pulling their own weight.
Yes, arriving at such results will require considerable amounts of time and money. But so does natural SEO, regardless of how automated the latest super SEO tool in your arsenal is. And another upside to advertising systems such as Adwords is that they are more or less made for doing all kinds of split testing, in order to increase your conversions.
By comparison, a lot of the SEO work being done out there is taken more or less on faith (from some “guru”), and measuring the actual results is sometimes very difficult.
Really, no more SEO?!
What I am saying is not that I think you should ditch all your search engine optimization efforts and go entirely for paid advertising options instead. On the contrary what immediately struck me when I watched the Traffic Crusher video was that is showed how there was only a trickle of traffic before and after the presenter activated his sources of paid traffic.
In other words, the site that was showcased was entirely dependent on various paid sources of traffic. In certain cases, testing out an affiliate offer for example, that may be perfectly alright. But for a bigger site that you are putting up for the long term you would certainly not want to be at the complete mercy of paid sources of traffic.
So with as so many other things in life, what is called for is a balanced combination. You need natural SEO efforts and paid advertising, and used correctly and in appropriate quantities I think those efforts will augment each other over time.
As for the natural ranking part Webpronews interviewed Matt Cutts about what he sees coming in 2009. And I would like to end with one of Cutts’ quotes from that article:
The challenge is not to pay so much attention to ranking, pay attention to traffic, pay attention to conversions and keep building good content and don’t worry about ‘can I show people that I rank number one for my trophy phrase.
Exactly what I was trying to get at in this post.
Photo by: eyeSPEVE
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