Google Adwords experts?

[PcarPhil]

Originally Posted by motion

OK, I hired a SEO company out of India to improve my organic Google results. I am completely amazed, without touching my site, they have improved my organic search results for my key search phrase: "property management websites" from 35th to 4th in just a week. They did it through link-building, which from what I can gather is just really submitting a description of my site to a whole lot of directories. It builds "site significance" with Google's search engine and improves results.

Would a few of you mind searching on "property management websites" (no quotes) and tell me what position Pointwide.com is on your page? Its 4th on my computer, but seems to good to be true!

Currently #4 in my search result.

Is the SEO company creating quality links or are they submitting your site to link farms? What directories are they submitting your site to?

[deathpunk dan]

Remember, link growth can get you penalized if google spots too many new inbound links at once. Penalties vary, from outright bans to 'minus' penalties where your domain is penalized a specific number of spots in the results.

The others are absolutely right about content still being king. Slow and steady. Sign
up for webmasterworld.com and check out the Google forums there. Lots of rubbish with great info too. Make sure your inbound links vary the link text. Latent semantic indexing is growing in importance. The old days of keywords 1 and 2 in the link text, page title, h1 tag, meta tag etc are going bye bye. For every keyword phrase you target, google has got a list of statistically likely to occur other phrases, and part of your relevance depends on that...

Motion, please feel free to pm me as well with any Qs on ppc/seo/general sem stuff.

[motion]

Originally Posted by Kaefer

Currently #4 in my search result.

Is the SEO company creating quality links or are they submitting your site to link farms? What directories are they submitting your site to?

I really have no idea if they are quality or not. Here's a screencapture of my mail inbox showing some of the submission confirmation emails:

[lendaddy]

We started this yesterday as well Richard. We are also bidding $2-3 and getting top three placement. We have our daily limit set lowish for now so we don't get a huge bill at the end of the month.

Once our organic results get better we can maybe cut back but this is some serious exposure for now.

[motion]

Well, here's a bit of my experience. After getting a #4 organic placement on Google, I axed my Adwords campaign altogether. Immediately, my traffic and sales slowed to a trickle, despite the great organic placement. I kept my Adword campaign off for 2 weeks with no improvement. Turned it back on and voila! sales and traffic are picking up. Its my opinion that you need a top-of-page paid placement to still get the attention. YMMV, but that's my experience, unfortunately. BTW, I have slid off of page 1 to #12 with the organic results, and the orders are still coming in. I guess the Adwords budget is here to stay.

[deathpunk dan]

Keep in mind that the sales cycle is often much longer when the clicks come from organic results...it's not uncommon for your most clicked organic kw phrases to show little or no direct revenue in your stats during a short time frame...because most people are looking for information when they search and click on org results. AW allows you much more control over the creative and the specific kws to target..

Here's an example. We rank highly for ''marvel mystery oil', and get a lot of organic traffic for that phrase, but the stats show very little $/visitor contribution from that phrase. Turns out a lot of the searches are people looking for MSDS info for industrial applications and not looking to buy it...

YMMV

I always think of AW and organic seo as complementing each other.

[techweenie]

DD makes a good observation.

Industry studies say the average time from initial visit to purchase of consumer goods is 34 hours. Obviously 'considered purchase' and big ticket items could take longer to convert.

Our business is lead generation and delivery in the world of performance parts. We rarely get complete conversion info from our customers, but anecdotally, Google-sourced links seem to convert at about 0.4% on the first visit.

We have a six year head start on the organic side, so with no overt effort we often have #1 ranking on a huge number of categories. Our SEO efforts only began mid-year and we've added another 10K or so phrases with first-page results. But ours is a 'long tail' business with hundreds of thousands of relevant search results.

For us, AdWords brought a jolt of traffic, but we've seen a continuous tapering of AdWords results, even with day-to-day intensive management. We've cut our AdWords spending in half with no observable effect on organic results.