Five Reasons Why SEO Is Going to Lead to Buying Traffic
June 24, 2011
This week I have engaged in five separate conversations with super-bright 30 somethings. The one theme that made these conversations like a five act Shakespearian comedy was SEO or search engine optimization. The focus is on getting traffic, not building a brand or contributing to a higher value conversation.
Google continues to entertain search circus goers with its trained Pandas. These Pandas do some interesting things; for example, the gentle mouthing of the word “panda” causes heart palpitations among the marketers whose jobs depend on boosting Web traffic. Let’s face it. Most Web sites don’t get too much traffic. One company which I am reluctant to name was excited to tell me it had 800 unique visitors in May 2011.
Move the world? Maybe. Move a nail salon’s Web traffic? Probably a tough job.
Okay. No problem if the 800 visitors were the global market for the firm’s product. But the 800 included robots, employees, consultants, and the occasional person looking for this firm’s specific type of archiving software.
With Web site costs creeping upwards, bean counters want to know what the money is delivering. The answer in many cases is, “More costs.”
Not good news for expensive, essentially unvisited, Web sites. The painful fact of life is that among the billions of Web pages, micro sites, blogs, and whatever has a url only most get lousy traffic.
Archimedes, by way of Yale, said, “Give me a lever big enough and I’ll move the world.” The world? Maybe. Traffic to a vacuum cleaner repair shop in Prospect, Kentucky? Not a chance.
Pumping up traffic to a tire store or a nail salon or even a whizzy Internet marketing company is a tough job. I gave up on traffic after we did The Point (Top 5% of the Internet) right before we sold the property to CMGI. What the heck was traffic? What could or should one count? Robots? Inadvertent clicks?
That experience contributed to my skepticism about reports about how many visitors a site has.
“Google Quietly Launches Panda Update Version 2.2” is a good write up about the fearsome Panda. Like A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Panda keeps on coming, wrecking weekends for traffic crazed marketers. Bummer. I learned:
Supposedly, one thing Google was going to address with Panda 2.2 is the issue of scraper sites – websites that republish other people’s content on their own site, usually making money from Google AdSense in the process – outranking content originators. As Frank Watson noted, "Google created the mechanism that clogs its own data centers and overwhelms its own spam battlers."
Ah, Google as the prime mover and its nemesis.
Now the five reasons:
- Google will offer sites a way to get traffic. Buy more Adwords. Simple.
- Traditional Web sites are not the preferred way to get information in some demographic segments; for example, those under 20.
- Social networks are not only better than results lists; social networks are curated. Selection is better than relevance determined by tricks.
- Content is proliferating so brute force indexes are having to take short cuts to generate outputs. Those outputs are becoming less and less useful because other methods of finding are fresher and more likely to be on target
- Users don’t know or care about the provenance of certain types of content. Accuracy? Who has time to double or triple check. Uncurated results can be spoofed.
A tip of the hat to the SEO experts. Most of the relevance problems in the major brute force indexes are directly attributable to both the indexing companies and the SEO professionals.
So what about the users? Eureka. Ask one’s social network, Facebook.
Stephen E Arnold, June 23, 2011
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion
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4 Responses to “Five Reasons Why SEO Is Going to Lead to Buying Traffic”
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[…] Five Reasons Why SEO Is Going to Lead to Buying Traffic (arnoldit.com) […]
Directories, payed ones are for sure a source of buying traffic.
For sure there are tones of ways to get free traffic…
[…] Five Reasons Why SEO Is Going to Lead to Buying Traffic Beyond Search: This week I have engaged in five separate conversations with super-bright 30 somethings. The one theme that made these conversations like a five act Shakespearian comedy was SEO or search engine optimization. The focus is on getting traffic, not building a brand or contributing to a higher value conversation. // Posted on Saturday 25 June 2011 Subscribe in a reader Click here to subscribe to Pandia Search Engine News by email! Filed under: All (summaries) and Search engine marketing and Weekend […]
I’m kind of confused what point you’re endeavoring to make. Certainly there is a healthy market in purchased traffic already. As a result of SEO will there’s more reasons to buy traffic? This traffic will become more expensive? What?
In this post you claim that Panda “causes heart palpitations” among marketers tasked with generating traffic. Oh really? Not I, and certainly not any of the search marketers I know. We’ve seen more algorithm updates than most people have had hot breakfasts. Major algorithm updates like Panda can be disruptive, but they don’t provoke the panic you seem to suggesting Panda is inciting in the SEO world.
Of course, your view of SEO is a singular one, based on your expressed regard (or, rather, lack thereof) for search-derived traffic. By your definition this traffic must be dishonestly derived, as SEO is pure gaming. But there are actually *deserving* sites that get a large amount of traffic from search, because they’re the right matches for brand queries, or they offer comprehensive and relevant (gasp) information, or people in large numbers have expressed value in a site through linking. Panda is, here, hardly a threat.
Oh, and my clients universally like traffic they didn’t have to buy, thank you very much. It provides them with exposure. It builds their brand. And most of all, it demonstrably makes them money.