I remember the day back in April, 2012. That morning noticed that my collection of over 100 “SEO Blogs” had been di-indexed by Google, and that my friend’s blog network (of over 350 blogs) had been deindexed as well. The sinking feeling was like all of the air had been kicked out of my lungs.
These blogs had taken a LOT of time/money/effort to put up (my friend had more than $50k into building his network). For years, Google had rewarded everyone for this kind of behavior by making our sites rank very well. But the times were a changin’, and Google was now on the hunt for spam, targeting millions of other “SEO” sites that were created solely for the purpose of increasing the rankings of other sites.
The message was clear, Google is smarter than us, and they are cracking down on spam by punishing sites with “Unnatural linking” notices and/or dramatic drops in rankings, overnight. Even my wife’s legitimate real estate site(s) took a hard hit, and went from being a top lead source in our market, to a dwindling liability.
“SEO Is No Way To Build A Business”
After speaking with one of my marketing mentors, it was clear to me that SEO could no longer be countered on as primary source of sustainable traffic. Google wants us to BUY traffic from them, and (like it or not) it’s really the only way to virtually guarantee quality traffic for a working online business. This does not mean that getting organic (and other forms of traffic) should be ignored, they are still important – but they are not “putting first things first” in these post “Panda/Penguin” days.
After many sleepless nights of worry and contemplation, I gradually began to come to grips with the reality of the SEO game moving forwards. A finely-tuned online sales funnel, synchronized with working Google AdWords strategy, is a far more controllable, measurable and scalable marketing approach to growing a successful online business.
With that said, even though I’d already been using AdWords since 2004, I made a very intentional decision to focus on Mastering AdWords, which by now is one of the largest marketing channels in the world.
Finding “True North” With AdWords
Unlike SEO, AdWords lets you test the performance of specific keywords, quickly and with exacting accuracy. No other service, data or speculation can tell you how your market behaves on your website like AdWords can. This competitive intelligence is private, and yours alone once you uncover it. Many (most) other advertisers in your space lack the discipline, know-how and finesse to properly uncover this information.
Once this information is “mined” from AdWords, you will have a far better understanding of what the “True North” keywords (e.g. Buying Keywords) are in your market. Then you can apply that knowledge to your SEO promotion by “tuning” your website’s onpage factors more effectively – and building more appropriate backlinks to help increase your rankings for the keywords that actually work.
If you are using AdWords and struggling with your organic traffic, I recommend that you focus on making your campaigns work better by measuring the behavior of your visitors with Google Analytics, using Remarketing effectively and optimizing your landing pages. This will put you back in control of your marketing and create a sustainable source of affordable traffic while you work to improve your organic traffic.
