Back at Work – Realization of Search Saturation
After the long break from work and some much needed time with my family, I’m back in the office (with a new coffee pot, thanks to my father and mother-in-law) and I’m shifting gears and starting to look deeper and harder into organic search. That crazy thing. I’m not cutting off all ties with paid search, it just is taking a back seat for a while… we’ll see.
To start the year off right, I thought it best to really dive into some of my employer’s more important search terms. Those terms you might be asking?… generic. Highly searched, highly competitive, yet highly profitable. Why do you think you see so many ads for insurance, or online schools, or investing? Those are the people who see the biggest bang for their buck for paying the most for your click. So why is this a problem.
Just as these vertical’s paid search and display campaigns might be gigantic, the affiliate marketers and content creators backing them up are just as big. Are you looking for car insurance or an online degree? Don’t type in ‘car insurance’ or ‘online degree’ in your search browser unless you want a site that will sell your information to the highest paying provider. It’s a system that works, but quite honestly, from a 50 thousand foot level, a lot of discredit goes to those searchers like you and me out there. Are we getting the service that best matches what we want? Probably.. damn, but maybe not. I guess that depends on if you know how to search for the product or service you’re looking for.
So what does this mean for me and my ongoing endeavor for search engine optimization?
Some friends and partners of mine over at KEO Marketing in Tempe, AZ have really pushed an interesting aspect of SEO on to me. “How do we get through all of the mumbo jumbo of content pushers, and affiliate aggregators in our space?” Focus your efforts along side theirs. Better yet, expand our efforts by leaps and bounds.
These affiliate websites have tons and tons of other websites networked together performing single, high output, actions at a time… and with those actions, money goes right to them. But their network of sites do all the heavy lifting.
If, as a business, we can focus our efforts as expansively as they can, shouldn’t we be able to start edging back into the 2nd or 1st pages of some long tailed keyword search results? People are typing huge search terms in these days… because they see that crap! Those are the searchers we want to see come to our site directly.
So what’s the process in doing this? You should know by now… most likely, you’re into search (why else would you even consider reading this far down into my post?).
Peace
