Quote:
Originally Posted by Larry Legend
fattony7891,
Your anti-SEO advice seems to be very out of date. Nothing you said makes me think you are familiar with Hummingbird at all. Also, "if you are not first you are last" makes no sense at all. First position gets an average of 32% of the traffic for a given keyword, so if the keyword you are ranking for is high traffic, you can still receive plenty. Not to mention that you can do things such as using Rich Snippets that will increase your CTR when lower than 1st position.
Paid search is the exact opposite of what you explain it to be. It is great when no one else is bidding on your words, but it is by its very nature a race to the bottom, where eventually you will be getting your margin squeezed out by competitors.
It sounds like your strategy would be good for a sketchy business like fake weight loss pills or something like that, but for a legit business, SEO is going to bring significantly more longterm value than paid.
And I am a believer in paid traffic as well, because of course it does work, but the best strategy for someone brand new is to utilize a lot of paid up front while they build out SEO for longterm and eventually wane off of paid into more SEO focused online marketing.
You are right you can get some decent traffic from 2nd and 3rd spots. My comment was more tongue in cheek than hard fact. But as you said it needs to be a higher traffic keyword and that very often means more competition, which means even more time and cost to rank (and there's never a guarantee that you'll rank super high, potential worries about negative SEO on a new domain) which then again then starts to bring into question whether it's worth your time.
My main gripes with SEO are more opportunity cost, the time sitting around waiting for the site to get traffic and then the anxiety that comes from hoping your site and thus livelihood doesn't get flushed down the ****ter every single Google update.
Your point about PPC costs being pushed up over time due to increased competition is right but only up to a certain point (at least for AdWords, I dont know anything about FB ads). If you are dropshipping then sure because there's less to differentiate yourself on and people can easily just compare prices and go for the cheapest product. But there are many ways to beat out the competition with paid traffic for the long haul with a proper high quality product.
The great thing about AdWords is that you can't really just compensate for ****ty ads by outbidding people (only to a certain extent at least, and then you have to deal with your margins being hit)
If my product is better than yours (i.e. unique and thus has unique features and benefits), I should be able to make more compelling ads, my ads should get higher CTRs and Quality Scores (meaning cheaper clicks, my ads showing more often and in higher positions) and if my website and after sales funnel converts well, then I'm in play.
Again I'm not 100% anti-seo at all. I love the idea of SEO in certain niches and as I said I do use SEO on my sites. I just wanted to give people an idea of some of the pitfalls of SEO, because I fell people look at SEO with rose tinted glasses. As a long-term solution and only source of traffic, SEO is way too risky for me.
(Of course I'm presenting a false dichotomy, in reality it's prob optimal to go for a combo of SEO and PPC long-term, that would solve all the problems.)
Last edited by fattony7891; 02-20-2014 at 07:47 AM.