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Mike Salt

ipositions.co.uk

ipositions

(Yeah that's us, but we deal with small businesses more than we deal with large companies since we're not a massive company ourselves)

Hi, apart from owning iPositions I have shares in a cleaning business and certain other businesses in the wedding industry. Like Thomas said internet directories like the yellow pages still bring a return and we do in fact use them. We also advertise with Google Adwords and even though we are also ranked highly for our local keywords I would never stop using Adwords.

For the cleaning business Facebook advertising was useless but for the wedding ones it works great, so again it's all about trial and error.

We do a lot of email marketing and it has a very very high return simply because our followers are people that would have already bought from us before and are keeping an eye out for more of our email-only offers.

In total our internet generated sales can be divided into the following demographic:

Organic positions on SE: 20%

Paid listings like Google: 25%

Paid listings like Yellow pages (and some other niche directories for the areas): 30%

Facebook: 5%

Email marketing: 20%

Most of our traffic comes from  organic positions but we seem to get better conversions from our paid efforts.

Hope this helps

You seem to have answered this all by yourself already, reciprocal links and close to useless nowadays and since you do not think you will get any direct traffic from their site I wouldn't bother if I were you.

Hi thanks for the reply (first time a moz staff member gets in touch with me Woot!) I've literraly copied part of your answer and sent it to my clients and it seems to have done the trick! Thanks a million!

"And if one was so inclined to build bad backlinks to a competitor it would have a negative effect"

There is a whole branch called Negative SEO specialised in destroying your competitor' SERPS and though you will find loads of sites promoting that they do this in a "Completeley legal" I urge you not to succumb to the temptation of trying it.

The time and money you would spend trying to negatively impact others would be better spent on optimizing your own site, and think about it: If suddenly anyone above you starts dropping in rankings and your site is the only one that ascends don't you think someone is going to wonder why?

I'd build a new adsense site on Lowcarddiet.com but I'd host it with a different company so I don't get penalized for having the same C block address for both sites.

To clarify you would only need to do this since you're trying to optimize the two sites for the same keyword,

From what I've seen Google assumes that sites hosted by two different hosts are probably run by separate entities, and therefore links between the two sites are less likely to appear as an effort to game the SERPs.

This of course brings up the question of whether EMDs are still worth buying in which case I would say they are.

Finally the most important question is whether you already have a presence on the first page for that keyword, if you've got the number one spot I would justify making the effort of getting another site there, if not then your time might be better spent improving your rank for that keyword.

Hope this helps