I’ve been mostly silent the last year or two. However I’m making a radical shift in my business. Going forward, my primary source of traffic is expected to be PPC not organic rankings. For someone who’s been doing SEO and link development for almost 10 years, that’s quite a shift.
The fact is, being #1 in the serps is no longer being #1. Google is consuming more and more of the front page space for their own purposes. I saw a search result last week for a tablet computer where the first organic listing was about spot #8. And with Google’s visual blending of the paid ads with the organic listings, the only way to be #1 is to be in the #1 ad position.
In the end, organic rankings no longer deliver the quality or volume of traffic that they used to in my niche.
I was previously rather successful with PPC campaigns. But things have changed. I was actually at the forefront of the PPC stuff back in the early 2000’s in my niche, then I quit doing it. However I trained many of the people in my niche now doing PPC and many of the others have followed my lead. So my new PPC campaign simply doesn’t stand out. Results were tepid at best.
Sound like a problem? Actually, it’s an opportunity. It turns out that worked so well before, with click rates north of 10% simply don’t work anymore - particularly in the face of everyone else who’s doing the same thing. So I’m delving into some additional areas in order to get back up to speed on this stuff.
Now, you’ve all got Andrew Goodman’s and Perry Marshall’s books. Sorry, they just don’t cut it anymore. They are good foundations, but that’s it. Here’s the next thing you need: http://www.lucidwebmarketing.com/google-adwords-book.html . The book is well worth the $49 price. Few revelations, but nonetheless some different ways of looking at things that make it a steal. I believe that book is the first step towards my dominating the PPC venue in my niche.
I am also looking at joining the paid forums at Certified knowledge.org . I haven’t yet, I still need to digest and implement the lucid marketing PPC book, but I hope to join those forums soon. They come recommended to me, and $200/quarter is dirt cheap for advertising expense.
I’ll still be doing link development as time permits, and I still rank. But I won’t be using that as the baseline for my business anymore.
The interesting point this raises is that eventually my organic rankings won’t matter anymore. At that point it will probably beneficial for me to actually block Google from scraping my site. Not only will it save bandwidth and costs, but it will make my site and content unavailable to all the scrapers, spammers, and thieves that find my information via Google. that’s a pretty big benefit to lose all that crap. Google needs to step carefully so that they don’t cross the line where the drawbacks of organic ranking outweigh the benefits of blocking their bot. But I see that day coming in the not too distant future. It’s kind of odd to actually discuss the idea that Google traffic is no longer worth the effort.
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