When Your Content is Too Good

What do you do?

[conroy]

I have an informational site on a health topic that attracts a significant amount of organic search referrals to its many content pages. The content is extremely well written, very unique, and gives a very honest perspective on the topic.

The problem is monetizing it. The click through rate on adsense, standard blue text links to affiliate offers, or banners is incredibly low, conversions almost nonexistent. This is after all attempts at making the links look natural, making them look like blatant ads and many other things. I think I've tried near every adsense block size in every possible spot on my site. It seems the visitors are so interested in the content that they don't even see the links or adds.

This may be due to each page ranking very well for its specific phrase. In other words, people search for something specific and receive an article exactly on that topic. They seem to read the article and either read more articles on the site, or go back to their search.

What would you do?

[onepointone]

All I can say is, if looking at the keywords people use getting to your site... if there's a product that will help them, affiliate is your hands down best choice.

If the content is 'iffy' or your great content solves all their problems, adsense is best and you might need to build more sites on other topics.

[jojy]

Page rank does not matter as long as you have targeted traffic. My one of site related to yours have PR 1 but we have good amount of traffic.. the only thing matter is to ad placement and correct color using. I suggest you to check google heat map and refine the ad positions.

[stormy]

You've mentioned ad placement above the fold. On a site like yours, a nice adsense block after the article works a lot better - have you tried this? Also, are the ads relevant?

[anand84]

There was this example I read early during my webmastering days - If you know so much about say, Hawaii, you can either build a educative website on history, ethnicity, temperature,etc. or build a website where tourists to Hawaii will know how to reach there and what to look.

The first kind of 'informative' site will not convert well because people are not looking to buy. It is probably some sixth grader looking for info for his assignment. But the latter website will convert because it is the desperate travel bunch looking to get a good deal.

Same content, different perspective = better conversion

[anand84]

There was this example I read early during my webmastering days - If you know so much about say, Hawaii, you can either build a educative website on history, ethnicity, temperature,etc. or build a website where tourists to Hawaii will know how to reach there and what to look.

The first kind of 'informative' site will not convert well because people are not looking to buy. It is probably some sixth grader looking for info for his assignment. But the latter website will convert because it is the desperate travel bunch looking to get a good deal.

Same content, different perspective = better conversion