Does anyone here concentrate on ONLY serps on for traffic ? me too until today...... - Page 2

moredial · 23-01-08

Perry Marshall is doing a teleseminar today, Wednesday Jan. 23 at 10:30am Central Time, on adwords. The registration link he sent in an email will be PMed to both of you - it may only work for one of you.

I have never bought any of his stuff but his newsletters are interesting, from time to time, and may help sort some wood from the trees.

bazza99 · 23-01-08

smingle,

From my experience, once you see Google raising the min. CPC value then you'd may as well forget about using that domain again for Adwords in the near future.

That's not always the case - for example, they may have raised the CPC because they don't feel that your landing page was relevant to the keywords that you were advertising on.

If, on the other hand, they've decided that your Quality Score is too low because the landing page doesn't offer a good enough user experience, then they will penalise your entire domain as a result.

chrisuk · 23-01-08

More and more SEO and content building as some of the work I do is as a traffic partner with the big PPC's. Its getting harder and harder there to obtain traffic via ppc advertising and more expensive.

So am producing content sites in various niches like :
ActiveCareer - UK Job Search, Careers, Recruitment & Employment Advice

Of course you never get instant results like you do with ppc, rather you have to wait several weeks and months. But sites with content are an investment in the building, a platform that you can use for a variety of purposes as and when. If content truly is king with a gentle nudge and half compentent seo you can build a nice network of free traffic which you can send to ads or to an aff programme or if a particular site takes off build some real products around.

I used to love feed sites, kelkoo, espotting/miva, click lead stuff but market saturated now plus you can't sell those to anyone. These days I actually enjoy writing content and I get cheap hire to speed it up. Might employ a seo eventually to free up some time.

tbp · 23-01-08

Quote:

With regards to this last campaign, I would like to continue with this nice little "niche" I have found but have a question which maybe someone could hele me with, should I either :

1. Create a totally new landing page with fresh content, and ppc campaign based around this new landing page

or

2. Change all of the page (content etc) which has been "google slapped" and see if it lets me lower the cpc ?

I had exactly the same problem, and its so frustrating!

In my case, I bought another very similar domain, did a straight 301 redirect to the old domain, and used that in my ad's. Problem solved! No changes to the landing page at all (so exactly the same, just appearing to be on a different domain), and its all been running fine for about 3 months now.

Its ridiculous, as it really shouldn't work, as the content hasn't changed at all, so therefore the quality score shouldn't of changed. It did work however, so i`m not complaining

Also worked instantly for me, as soon as I swapped the domain, saved the ad, the CPC was reset, and no problems from them on.

chrisuk · 23-01-08

Yep my problem with Google over this and why I think Adwords will eventually suffer for it is that a Google slap can be recovered via new domain, however this process simply encourages people to buy trash domains and seriously damages the ability to build a brand on google.

Imagine you buy a 5k premium domain and you find its slapped, or it gets slapped or worse you have built this brand over the last five years. Its easy to say G wouldn't do that unless you were a bit content thin but it happens. Google only cares about Google, they are like the tax man, they don't care about destroying businesses and livelyhood, they just grab grab grab. Because of market share they are arrogant, essentially some snot at adwords hq can blow away your campaign and income for any or no reason at all. By By brand name and hello new spam domain.

That can't be good for the consumer yet faced with the choice of income or no income what do you do. Adwords is hard as it is without being dragged back, 1 step forward then 2 steps back. Yet Google's pals, ebay and sites that carry their search feed seem just fine. Don't tell me the playing field is level at Adwords, no way at all.

moredial · 23-01-08

I listened in to the Perry Marshall this afternoon.

At the end of the day, his advice was pretty much the same as the work needed for an SEO campaign.

1. Find your niche market
2. Make sure your landing page is 100% focused on the ad content - different pages for different phrases - even to the point of different pages for colour options
3. Better to work on phrases with low numbers of searches that are targeted to your niche
4. Sometimes use words that show the old and existing product and new products and offer your visitors an ebook or leaflet of why they should look at the new and better product. Don't expect to sell a new product that no one has heard about before: it needs marketing.
5. Monitor the CTR and knock off low CTR phrases that are not matching your services. Promote the higher CTR so that the CPC comes down.
6. Run separate campaigns for Google, Search partner and content sites - best results typically from Google - if you manage the content sites and limit to those which perform well, this can work for you too.
7. Image ads can carry more message than text.

Considering the amount of work required, I think I prefer to do it once and SEO a site that I can then forget about for a couple of years. Rather than have to spend every day worrying about how each phrase is performing.

The other option is the long recommended one for a new niche: to do a test run with a few phrases in a CPC campaign and then write the site around the phrases that get the best conversion.

Renners · 24-01-08

Having been burnt on PPC with a very poor return I've not touched it for a long time preferring SEO.

A thought struck me though, Google Slapping is a great way to get your competitors banned from the listings by setting up some dodgy advertising pointing at their site, they get slapped and you reap the SEO benefits as their site drops off thje listing, or have I read it wrong!

Regards,
Renners.

tbp · 24-01-08

Quote:

Google Slapping is a great way to get your competitors banned from the listings by setting up some dodgy advertising pointing at their site, they get slapped and you reap the SEO benefits as their site drops off thje listing, or have I read it wrong!

The Google slapping talked about only applies to Adwords, and your minimum bid massively rising. It doesn't apply to your search engine results. I`ve had sites at number one, which have been slapped on adwords, but still kept their number 1 ranking. They are two different things, although obviously if a site is poorly optimised for one, it won't do well on the other. What is really being discussed here is when Google slaps you for no obvious reason, as it seems to do sometimes, probably due to a bug in the algorhythm.

Vrindavan · 27-01-08

>>I only do SEO and NEVER do PPC - make a good living - but get virtually ZERO google traffic either

are you able to get a good income without google traffic ?

befuddle · 27-01-08

I don't do any PPC (but have done briefly) and all my traffic originated from SERPS. 10% of my visitors are now regular users and over 400 of them have subscribed to the feed which I launched in the Summer.