Two Major Fallacies of Search Engine Marketing
Posted: Wednesday, November 10, 2010
by Terry Mitchell
http://commenterry.blogs.com
There are two major fallacies of search engine marketing that will cost you money if you are not careful. I know they have already cost me plenty. I wish I could start all over, knowing what I know now. Hopefully, I am about to save someone else a lot of money and headaches.
The first of these fallacies is the supposed sufficiency of getting your site on page one of Google. I'm here to tell you that, for the overwhelming majority of keywords, this is nowhere near good enough. With the exception of the top one-tenth of a percent of keywords (in terms of traffic), you must get your site in the top three of Google's organic search results in order to get any significant traffic and therefore make any serious money. And for the majority of keywords, you must get to the number one spot or nothing. In fact, I have my sites on page one of Google for lots of keywords for which I'm getting little or no traffic.
So the bottom line is this: Don't fall into the trap of losing money in the pursuit of the first page of Google and keywords with a gaudy number of broad searches. Stick with keywords for which you can achieve the top three positions of Google (at a minimum) and that have a significant number of exact searches.
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Top-level comments on this article: (4 total)I agree with you, Terry. This past Monday I did something I had never done before. I attended a seminar put on by a SEO company to try to lure web site owners into using their services. It's been so long since I've attended any conferences that I thought it would be nice to be able to 'talk shop' with people who understand the Internet.
Boy were my eye's opened! I think I understand SEO pretty well... been the the Googleplex a half-dozen times and to many other webmaster-related conferences. I had no idea how much mis-information was being passed around. It's good to read some common-sense ideas for SEO.Bruce, I'm glad you agree and find the article useful.
I've just recently started understanding keywords and Google search. Somebody said that if you get within the top 5 of page one for a specific keyword, you get 20% of that keyword's traffic.All these "products" that promise instant massive traffic, are they complete bs? Have you tried any of them?Jennifer, it is estimated that the top 3 positions in the Google organic search results get about 75% of the traffic. That's why I always emphasize top 3. Position #4 might get 5% while position #5 might get 3%. But you also need to consider the number of exact searches for your keyword (regardless of the number of broad searches). If that figure is small, then any percentage of it is natually going to be small as well.
And I can say with 99.99% certainty (and I'm sure Bruce would concur) that any product promising "instant massive traffic" is either complete bs (as you put it) or is providing worthless traffic. Yes, I have tried many of them with no success.
Very good information Terry. That's why out of the literally millions, probably billions of people that have tried internet marketing, only 5% have ever made any money doing it. The amount making significant money is obviously a small percentage of those, and most of those make money selling the dream to those that are convinced that they will be in that 5%. It's nice to see somebody tell the truth about this proposition, not in an attempt to discourage, but to educate. Very nice.David, great observation! I'm glad you found the article useful.
Don't know why it left me as an anonymous contributor, but I don't like it when it does that, so here is the correction, I hope.
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