Just a quick note on this for the time being – will be coming back to this regularly. When I first started the website I was told that google wouldn’t really start ranking me for a few months. And this was my experience. For the first six months I wasn’t coming anywhere in the top 10-20 for my keywords. However, after that I started getting ranked and coming up in the first page for quite a few of my main keywords.
Up till this point my google referrals had all come from pay-per-click. Once I saw how effective the organic search could be I started to play around with it. And within a few weeks I started coming in in the top 3 for a lot of keyword searches. I used a tool called the IBP – International Business Promoter. The part that I really used was the function which compared my site to top 10 sites with similar keywords. It then told you how to change your own site to replicate their success. It’s quite tedious but really worthwhile. You see an immediate pay-off in terms of traffic and I also think that people trust a site that comes up high on the organic searches rather than just the pay-per-click. A lot of people I talk to say they don’t even look at the pay-ads and that they purely focus on the organic searches. I’ve seen some stats where they look at the click through rate of the top 3 and it makes an enormous difference to be number 1. So that’s where we should all be striving for.
Anyway, more on this later.
September 5, 2007 at 2:46 pm
I agree that organic searching is the way to go – I don’t really click through the google-ads unless the search I’m doing isn’t really throwing up much choice.
I think it’s worth investigating the social networking side to improve traffic too.