It's like there's no cause/effect relationship online

I am referring to online marketing activities

[Lokutus]

I run both online and offline businesses.

With the latter there is a clear cause & effect relationship between the marketing I do and the results in terms of sales.

Online it's a whole "nudder" issue. Sometimes it feels that the more I do (ie, run more Adwords, build denser sites with more pages, establish more incoming links, give away more free stuff, etc.) the less the site in question generates in sales.

Then there's the whole SE thang. One of my sites showed up on G's 15th SERP for the most important keyword. Then the site dissapeared altogether from G for that keyword. It wasn't even in the top 1000 hits according to a rankings service. Now it's at 760th spot in the search results.

Anyone ever get frustrated?

[Lokutus]

I think I need a hug today.

;o(

[Lokutus]

Not only are my sites being ignored, but now I'm being ignored here too.

;o(

[buckworks]

((((Lokutus))))

Not sure what to say other than that, though. Frustration is part of the game.

[Lokutus]

So you too sometimes feel that all the work is getting you nowhere?

[buckworks]

If you do the right things and do them well it will pay off in the long run, but the short run can be a real roller coaster ride even if you're doing everything right. It can be crazy-making sometimes!

The challenge is to hang on amidst the ups and downs, and keep doing what you need to do to grow your business. Have faith in your longer-term vision.

(1) Work to broaden the sources of quality traffic to your site, and (even more important) ...
(2) Work on ways to improve conversion when they get there.

[Lokutus]

Ever had a website just plummet from the 5th SERP to 700th? That's what got me down this time.

:o(

[buckworks]

Yep, I've had that, and worse. Many people around here could tell stories .... unexplained ups and downs happen to everyone sooner or later if they're in the game long enough.

A couple of years ago my (then) host had an outage when Googlebot came calling and my site was absolutely gone from Google for several weeks. Traffic dropped by 80% or 90% until Google found it again.

Since then I've worked to become less dependent on free search engines for visitors. I still have a long way to go, and Google still sends the majority of my traffic. However, the non-Google portion is enough to live on if I had to.

Hang in there!

[Lokutus]

Thanks! That helped.

:o)