Ever Get disillusioned with SEO

[onlinemediadirect]

Many times now we have pushed certain keywords for homepage listings but we have found the traffic levels to be very poor and many cases first page listings turn out to be vanity.

The frustrating thing is that sometimes we have to tell some of our SEO customers that in order to get a good market share for there industry they will always have to do google adwords.

What are your thoughts on this .

Thanks

[IM_Learner]

It depends. You can't compare two totally different sites and analyze the results. e.g. You can't expect the traffic to some social media site and small business ERP solution provider's site to attract equal amount of traffic, even the gap will be too wide. I believe traffic will vary from industry to industry and using only SEO can never suffice the marketing needs. At some stage you will have to look at other options as well.

Having said that, it does not mean that using Google Ads or paid ads or social media will undermine the importance of SEO. Every aspect of Internet marketing is vital when it comes to making the site popular. The only thing is, one should know when to indulge in what.

If SEO is not reaping the desired benefits then you should first revisit the keywords you are targeting and the analytics data. It will give you wealth of information.

[onlinemediadirect]

I agree but I do feel that some SEO companies can fail to mention the fact that SEO and CPC are both needed in many cases. Customers feel CPC is an expensive means to an end when in reality they have to complete it to have any sort of full market share online.

[EGOL]

There are a lot of keywords that my sites rank #1 and #2 in the organic SERPs and I bid high enough to rank #1 or #2 in adwords.  With that level of adwords bidding only about 20% of my sales that originate from google are produced by adwords.

If I had to rely on adwords for these products it would not be worth the effort - because these are lower volume niches.

And, if my sites were ranking below position #3 in the organic SERPs the sales that I would get in these niches would be too low to be worth the effort.

To sustain a business I need a lot of products all ranking at least position #3 - which we easily have.

The point that I am trying to make here is that ranking "on the first page" isn't going to bring much traffic if you are down at position #7 for even a somewhat busy niche.  For most of the keywords that I compete for you need to be at least at position #3 to be "in the money".  So my attitude is "making the first page isn't good enough - I need to be in the top three".

[onlinemediadirect]

Your spot on the top three has to be achieve to be in the money. I have had a few examples that have delivered traffic with being at the bottom of the first page but not many.

[StalkerB]

Meh, kind of. It's frustrating when I don't make money from my efforts, but there's always something else to try and something else to chase. I have to believe I'll strike it rich one day

[SteveOllington]

A fair few of our clients don't use PPC at all... they tend to be the smaller businesses and they just don't have the budget for both. Of course they would do better with both but they do pretty good with just organic.

But yeah, I do get disillusioned at times too... not about the PPC side of things but when random, inexplicable and seemingly illogical stuff happens. Actually, disillusioned probably isn't the right word for me, I'd say more like upset and rageful lol.