Forum Moderators: martinibuster
My Blue Widget site is already number 1 on Google for "Blue Widget" in the US and all other English speaking localisations I can fathom. It's also number 1 for "Bleu Wigdet" and "Blu Wigit" and similar. Knowing that about 75% of my traffic comes from organic google searches (another 10% from Yahoo where the situation is the same) and the rest returns and randoms then I ask you this: WHERE DO I GO NOW?
Not to so long ago I started broaching $20/day on about 40,000 impressions per day. Given that my search engine rankings won't improve any further (and that the popularity of my Widgets are linked somewhat to news reports of their activities) what would you recommend for building the earnings from my site? It's pictures of widgets, not articles about them, that attract 95% of my visitors - affiliates and through-linking aren't big business in my game.
Would it be fair to say that I have reached a natural limit for earnings within the context of smartpricing or am I missing some tricks for growth? There wouldn't appear to be any more work or time I could invest in the site to attract more traffic.
Regards and good sex,
Panth
do some research on keywords relating to your topic as well as what keywords are being used presently to reach your site and expand there.
Look at some of your rivals; you may be #1 for search terms - but they may be earning more than you.
What are they doing right; what are you doing wrong - or simply not doing at all.
Once you're at #1, there's only one way to go, unless you keep at the very top of your game. But it's #1 in ROI that matters, you can't retire on nice Google listings! (Unless you own shares!).
am I missing some tricks for growth?
It's hard to prove a negative, so it's unlikely you can know for sure you can't do better unless you get access to Google's advertiser data and discover you're getting all the ad dollars for that area.
It's pictures of widgets, not articles about them, that attract 95% of my visitors
Sounds like you probably have a good opportunity to add a lot of traffic and AdSense income then. Folks looking for pictures are not necessarily those that will click an ad, or if they do, convert for the advertiser.
Beef up your articles, write new articles, make sure your pages are basically well constructed for the SEs.
My Blue Widget site is already number 1 on Google for "Blue Widget" in the US and all other English speaking localisations I can fathom. It's also number 1 for "Bleu Wigdet" and "Blu Wigit" and similar. Knowing that about 75% of my traffic comes from organic google searches (another 10% from Yahoo where the situation is the same) and the rest returns and randoms then I ask you this: WHERE DO I GO NOW?
I sugest you to start an AdSense account.:)
I started broaching $20/day on about 40,000 impressions per day
if your site isn't a forum, and the traffic is truly organic, that's pretty low.
Are those 40K AdSense PAGE or AD impressions?
Either way, I'd consider finding a new better paying widget.
it's only a matter of time until google dings your present site in the serps... for instance, how many of your pages are currently in the supplemental index.
if bill is right about the low payout, there could be a lot of work left to do on the present site, in terms of utilizing the proper channel data to possibly improve the epc.
putting up new content with the right page design, and driving quality traffic to it, is part of that effort.
Bill, I'm receiving about 40,000 ad impressions on around 5,000 uniques/17,000 views per day. I'm not entirely sure about danimal's logic of google supressing my No.1 position based purely on length of time in index.
Finally, would I do well to remove ad units from all but my best paying pages?
Thank you sirs.
Grab your log files, (supposedly they will have the complete referers), and select the search engine referrals. Extract keyword and SERP page from the referer
[google.com...]
kw: widget, page 1
[google.com...]
kw: widget3, page 3
then, count frequencies looking for keywords that send you reasonable traffic even if you are on page 2, 3 etc.
For example:
Keyword: widget1
Visits: 1000
Ranking: 1st page (1st position)
Keyword: widget2
Visits: 1
Ranking: 2nd page
Keyword: widget3
Visits: 10
Ranking: 3rd page
...
The idea is: if the keyword "widget3" sends you 10 visits even if you are in 3rd page, maybe if you ranked #1 for that (minor) keyword you could get 70-100 visits
Check for each keyword: it might as well be that you are in a "black hole", i.e. people browse to page 3 because your page is the first good one in the search results, i.e pages ranking higher than you are off-topic, that's why an unusually large percentage of people browse to page 3.
Identify those minor keywrd and build a page specifically to target them. If you rank #1 for the major keywords that should be no problem.
But - as others suggested - your time might be better spent trying to better monetize the traffic you already have. You are probably the best judge here!
I second this. Go after some sub niches. I've found a few that are good money makers. Use your main site as a traffic/search engine feeder.
40,000 ad impressions on around 5,000 uniques/17,000 views per day
On topics I've built sites around, that kind of traffic is easily worth $200/day, YMMV.
Maybe you don't have the right traffic or your ads aren't optimized enough, hard to say.
Then move those ads around until you get better CTR.
EPC is up to big G (mostly)
You said yourself that the demographic is "16 year old boys". I think your biggest problem is that this demographic is not much help when it comes to converting clicks. Heck with sites like Myspace out there that have ads plastered all over, your demographic is all but blind to ads.
You might consider trying to alter your demographic a bit. One thing that comes to mind is gossip/fashion. If you can talk about juicy details of your widget and what clothes your widget is wearing. Perhaps you can bring in a demographic of twenty to thirty something females. If you could bring that demo and serve them ads related to products they would be interested in ... well ... then you are playing the game.
When you're #1 for blue widgets on Google, where do you go from there?
Down.
Down.
not a function of time, rather, it's the constant changes that google makes in it's search ranking algorithms... many people have reported sudden drops in ranking that they were never able to understand.
think of a second site as insurance against such things.
Thanks to everyone for their input, I suppose I'll let you know in a few months' time whether I'm a millionaire!
danimal, I'm looking into a second site when I have the time, energy and minions. :)
Cheers
