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However, I have many clients that are in the top 5 positions for competitive keywords that their competitors use paid positioning for, and they are getting 5 times the traffic.
I just got a new client who is getting ~30 - 40 visits per day, using overture and Google. Another of my clients, who is in the #1, 2 or 3 slot for that categories main keywords w/o any paid listings gets an average of 150 visits per day.
Now this is a tourist destination in Mexico, so not as competitive as "plasma televisions uk" or something, but the ratio holds.
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edit - i see from the other post that perhaps you are talking about a service that "guarantees" you to have #1 for X keyword. In general they try to give you words that you could get anyhow "polkadot mayonnaise in artisan crafted glass jars". Check the company's site. Check their page rank. Check to see if *they* are #1 for any of the terms in their industry. Chances are they have to rely on email marketing because they have been banned from Google for using their spam techniques.
[edited by: PatrickDeese at 3:02 pm (utc) on May 20, 2003]
When SEO is done, I would assume that you would use a lot of content, which means a lot of text on the subject. Therefore, your site will 'show up' in the listing for all of the variations of that term, including the plural, and all the other ways of saying that term.
Organic SEO is better because ultimately you can show up in the listings for more terms and many different versions of that term. I looked at my list of keywords that people searched for last month on one of my sites and the list had about 18,000 unique terms. Could you imagine what it would cost to pay for all those terms?
We are not talking about ad words here, do we?
Are we talking about a company that will host 'your' home page on a different domain?
If they just modify content of your real homepage, they just wont cut in. External factors are too important.
If they host 'your' home page on a different domain they can put your site at risk.
Either way, filter their SPAM and turn the page.
If you want to do all the work yourself, everything you need is here at this site. WebmasterWorld has been worth gold to me.
"We design for you a web portal which will be similar to your introduction web page and then market it. The web portal is linked to your main web site. All the prospects we generate will be targeted at this web portal, where they are re-directed to your main web site. We won't take the credit for other people's work and achievements."
Where we form a relationship we agree to deliver a number of hits to your web portal each month and we bill for each one produced at the agreed rate. Our aim is to generate as much business as possible for you each month and any surplus in hits over our agreed ceiling you will receive for free.
I guess if you wanted someone to manage a complicated set of keywords, there would be some circumstances in which it would be worth paying someone to manage this for you.
However I think that they are targeting people who know nothing about SE promotion, rather than people who understand AdWords and just want to farm out the donkey work.
The other kind of people offering this are those who will use spam techniques to push up referrals for a brief period before being banned, pocket their fees on the basis of initial results and then either leave you high and dry or charge you all over again for setting up another shortlived spammy "portal".
after all its conversion rates that are important really, masess of visitors looking for lloyd grossman finding there way to my site wiill be greatly dissappointed!
BUT..
Optimization is better for:
1. Building a brand rather than sales today
2. When you dont want your clicks to stop after the ad budget runs out. Its long-term and expenditure on opt. must be assessed against future benefits - months, if not years
3. If you want to get exposure for all pages or keywords, not just a few. doing PPc for hundreds of pages for many keywords just does not have good ROI in most cases.
The simple question is "What guarantee are you giving me?" - You want a 'guarantee'of a first page listing on Google for your required search term or you don't pay them...they won't go for this.
What they will give you is "A guaranteed Top 10 listing on the Top 10 search engines" - when pressed they will agree that this means a 'worst case scenario' of 10th position on Hotbot or worse.
If they fail to achieve this, you don't pay - so do your budget based on the worst case. My analogy to them is that they are going to buld the best billboard you've ever seen but cannot say which road it will be on - it may be on the busiest commuter route ever but similarly it may end up on a country lane that no-one ever drives down.
For how many keywords? all the keywords?
A cost per keyword - Top 10/Top 10 you pay for each word/phrase or the more woolly one where you pick 10,20,30 keywords or phrases and they guarantee to get 1 of them to number 10 in the worst of the 10 engines.
