15 {{ upvoteCount | shortNum }}
15 {{ upvoteCount | shortNum }}

Question about SEO versus Adwords

by rms1
12 replies
  • SEO
    • |
My new wordpress website is ready to go live this weekend. It will replace my old site which I have had for 7 years. I will be transferring the domain to the new site.

I am a novice with WordPress so I have had someone put the site together for me and I have been adding the content for several weeks, I have approx 100 items for sale on the site. These are established products which sell well for me on Amazon and have sold reasonably well on my current site despite the very low number of visits I get.

As I am sure you experts will know, WordPress has Yoast for SEO. The system enables you to fine tune your pages in order to get the green light for each page. The green light tells you that the page is well optimised and then you can do a page analysis to fine tune even further.
It has been hard work but I have almost 100% green throughout the entire site.

I now have a dilemma, should I be patient and wait for this to happen organically or will I need to use Google Adwords as well. The problem with Adwords is that my products are low value approx £8 and I find it hard to get the numbers to add up as most of my keywords are around £1 per click.

What I want to know is, can I grow my business with good SEO alone without Adwords. I know that there is much to do off site as well as on.

Another question is, will my new site keep the same page rank of 2/10 as the old one, if it's the same domain.
#adwords #question #seo #versus
  • Profile picture of the author serpyre
    Yes, but - don't put too much weight in to those green lights. They help, but there are many more areas as well. Around 60% of all direct traffic comes from organic, ppc, email and only 1-2% from social media - indirectly social media produces traffic but is in effect a branding channel. The simple rule is how many visitors do you get per $1 of spend including you time (which is chargeable). We can tell you that you will probably get 5-10 organic visitors per $1 - how you spend that on hosting - on ppc - on generating press releases - is up to you, however 100 products is a pretty low count for a low value item, would normally expect 1,000s.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9435583].message }}
    • Profile picture of the author rms1
      Originally Posted by serpyre View Post

      Yes, but - don't put too much weight in to those green lights. They help, but there are many more areas as well. Around 60% of all direct traffic comes from organic, ppc, email and only 1-2% from social media - indirectly social media produces traffic but is in effect a branding channel. The simple rule is how many visitors do you get per $1 of spend including you time (which is chargeable). We can tell you that you will probably get 5-10 organic visitors per $1 - how you spend that on hosting - on ppc - on generating press releases - is up to you, however 100 products is a pretty low count for a low value item, would normally expect 1,000s.
      Yes, that makes a lot of sense and I never did buy into the Social Media advertising hype but your figure of 1-2% is an eye opener.

      Re the 100 items, these are home produced self help CDs and mp3s. We could make many more but they would just be BS in order to boost our products numbers. The big thing in our favour is that our profit margins are very high
      {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9435609].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author serpyre
    That makes sense, stick with what you know. Going back to the growth - yes but you will hit a saturation point and given your products are not mass-market it is an open question where that is. Adwords is good for long tail niche and branding with good budgets - everything in the middle will generally make you poor very quickly - there are always exceptions.

    On a medium to long term basis it will has come back to 2-30 visitors per $1 spend - whichever way you do it - the higher the number the more experience you need to get there. Remember you are competing in a global marketplace with large corporates and small niche suppliers - experience is relative to the size of store they worked on. Someone incredibly experienced in SME sites might still only get you to 10-15 visitors per $1.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9435622].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author alvinchua91
    "Adwords is good for long tail niche and branding" - serpyre

    What he said makes a lot of sense, especially with respect to branding - with Adwords, you are able to create a brand very well because you can bid for other company/competitor keywords as well if you do it properly.

    However, I would recommend SEO for everything else. A research by Nielsen and GroupM UK has proven from 1.4 billion search queries that only less than 6 % of overall clicks go to Adwords - which means that you're losing out on a potential 94% if you do not do SEO.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9435661].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author perfectionmovers
    You Should have patience for the ranking to come.

    __________________________________________________
    Professional Movers | movers
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9435713].message }}
    • Profile picture of the author rms1
      Originally Posted by perfectionmovers View Post

      You Should have patience for the ranking to come.

      __________________________________________________
      Professional Movers | movers
      I did say, will I keep the ranking that I already have.
      {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9435968].message }}
      • Profile picture of the author perfectionmovers
        Originally Posted by rms1 View Post

        I did say, will I keep the ranking that I already have.
        yes You will have ranking bro if you keep doing SEO
        {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9438141].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author WebAssertive
    The Green Light - is based on the primary keyword that you enter. It's pretty easy to optimize a page for a keyword like "baseball cards", but is that the keyword that's going to drive the most traffic to your website? also, how many other websites are you competing against to win traffic from the keyword "baseball cards"? what if the best keyword was actually "affordable baseball cards"? (just a quick example)

    I would suggest learning as much about SEO as you can in order to rank your pages for the keywords that will drive the most "targeted" traffic to your website.

    I would suggest reading this by MOZ SEO: The Free Beginner?s Guide From Moz
    & this by Wordtracker Keyword research | Wordtracker Academy

    The Green Light is only the beginning to SEO, but if you're not entering the BEST primary keyword, you could be optimizing your pages for unprofitable keywords. What a waste
    Signature
    WebAssertive | Facebook
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9436000].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author WebAssertive
    Adwords is a great tool for earning profits, as long as you're earning profits. Simply calculate how much you're spending on Adwords and see if the profits are worth it. If you can make money on Adwords while working on the organic search results, then more power to you!

    Adwords will not "grow" your business, unless you're running some type of branding campaign.
    Signature
    WebAssertive | Facebook
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9436010].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author MSMA
    Adwords is wonderful where it fits, but based on the numbers you provided, it looks like it will cost you about ten times what you'd take away from a sale in order to get a conversion. Unless you've got a heck of a repeat business model and the e-marketing to deliver on it, I'd say Adwords is way down the traffic generation list for you.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9436604].message }}
    • Profile picture of the author rms1
      Thank you everyone for the very sound advice. I now have the answer to my question.
      {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9436628].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author muncheech
    Make sure all your redirects are perfect. Biggest mistakes I see are people not doing redirects properly. Your PR should be fine.

    Reguarding SEO vs Adwords it is up to you.

    I always do adwords because of the keyword insight still available. Also help guide my SEO strategy. Very controlled environment which is what I like.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9436659].message }}

Trending Topics