Organic or paid revenue?

What’s better for your revenue return? Organic or paid traffic? It’s an ongoing discussion and one I had again this week. Paid converts better and page one on mobile isn’t what it used to be.

What I learned

• Does organic traffic have any value?
• Organic #1 on mobile is page 2
• Why paid converts higher
• Google is a marketplace
• What’s the best return for your resources?

Transcript

Hey, welcome back, Rankers. How you going? Had a few discussions this week about organic traffic and the value, and as we`ve shown before, you can get the same brand traffic from paid and it converts a lot higher than what it will from organic, so you`re better off spending some money on that, and those sorts of things.

And this conversation also happened online with Dr. Pete Meyers. And Pete Meyers, he`s a really smart SEO guy, publishes a lot. And he was saying, look, in 2013 that number one organic position was 64% higher because what he`s saying now is, as we`ve talked about before, number one organic on mobile, you`re off that first screen, right? Because you`ve got ads, you might have image carousels, you might have people also ask, you might have Google My Business, you might have a whole bunch of other things, rather than that traditional number one organic.

The conversation then went through that everyone`s saying, well there`s only paid and organic, and Danny Sullivan from Google basically was saying the same thing, there`s paid and organic. And our approach to it is this: you`ve got to look at Google as a marketplace now, it`s no longer the directory that it used to be. And how are you going to get the greatest value, the best return from that marketplace? And it comes from a combination of organic traffic and also paid, but you`ve got to work out where the best way to spend your resources are for the return that you`re getting for those. So SEO isn`t dead. Technical SEO is more important than ever because it affects every channel of certainly a retailer`s business because technical SEO is essentially user experience. It`s making the site run better for the customer because let`s face it, that`s what Google`s looking for. It`s looking for results that are better for its users. And that`s what you have to be, as we`ve said before.

Now just a heads up that I’ll be hosting a workshop once more at this year’s Retail Global conference on the Gold Coast. It’s on from May 27-29. The workshop is based on my upcoming book, “Get Stuffed Google! – Increasing Sales before Traffic” and is a must for any eCommerce retailers looking to put sales growth before the whims of Google. We have a discount code available; so don’t forget to offer it to your clients and prospects! The code is: STEWART100

Hopefully that`s helpful and remember, as always, like, share, subscribe, comment, wherever you are, and I will respond. Thanks very much. Bye.

Jim

Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.