Over the past few months, I’ve finally succeeded in ranking on the first page of the SE results for some very competitive search terms. If you’ve been reading my posts over the past few weeks you know what some of the terms are and I’ve shared exactly how I did it so I’m not going to rehash that again.
Some of these search terms have over 20 million results and one of them has 100 million results so it’s not like you can rank in the top 10 overnight and I didn’t. It’s taken about a year but now I know how to do it and I could repeat it. I don’t think it would take a year and I could rank highly for long-tail keywords quickly.
Before I took on the challenge of ranking for highly competitive search terms, I checked the traffic of those terms to make sure it would be worth the effort. The range was around 300 to 1,000+ searches per day for these terms so it appeared that ranking in the top 10 would drive plenty of traffic but that hasn’t turned out to be the case.
For example, one of the terms gets 300 G searches per day according to the SEO Book Keyword Tool but I only get about 15 visitors per day for that term…not exactly a flood of traffic. But on the bright side, I’m ranked highly for 3 search terms and I’ve noticed the number of people signing up for my notification list growing faster since I’ve been getting more search engine traffic so there definitely has been some benefit.
From all this, I’m beginning to thing that paid traffic (PPC, banners, etc.) might be the way to go for several reasons. First, it doesn’t take weeks or months to get the traffic. Second, you aren’t subject to changes in the search engine algorithms to wipe out your traffic. Third, since you get the traffic faster, you can test & improve the conversion ratios faster. What’s wrong with paying $1 for traffic if you make $1.10, $1.30, or even $2? Nothing. What do you think about SE traffic vs paid traffic?
Tags: Copywriting, Online Business
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Paid traffic is the way to go if you’re a smart enough businessman to stay on top of your costs and make sure you are making money, which I think you would have no problem doing. SEO traffic, while free, is fickle, and could change at any moment when the search engines decide.
I don’t know about most people, but I don’t think rankings can mean more traffic.
Look at Pagerank. People get good PageRank but low traffic.
I’m looking back into doing more with paid traffic. Free traffic has ended up being too costly.
With paid traffic you can get the targeted traffic within hours. With free traffic it takes months and lots of man hours.
You just need to keep on top of your costs. Which is the same thing you need to do for unpaid traffic.
I don’t think rankings can mean more traffic. I have always tried to avoid paid traffic but I am starting to look into doing more with paid traffic and advertising. Free traffic has ended costing too much time (and time is money).
Hi Robert,
Here’s my ten cents (or tuppence worth in Britspeak;) …
I get too darn frustrated with the search engines!
(which is why I relegated them to the back of my book.)
I go ‘paid traffic’ all time (although my favourite form of payment is commissions or ‘work in kind’ with my alliance partners.
Also, I’m happier with much less traffic but far higher quality and better conversion.
Hope you’re keeping well and that we get chance to speak again soon,
Ed.
PS. Cindy you really hit the nail on the head — everyone talks about organic being free, but forget to factor their own time.
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