First Page Placement, More Than Anything Else, Brings Traffic

Pay per click marketing. Banner ads. Classified ads. Craigslist spamming. Joint ventures. Email marketing. SMS marketing. Magazine ads. Billboards. CPA advertising. Even billboards, these days, frequently have URLs on them, because everyone is trying to figure out how to drive traffic to their website.

The thing is, people have done studies of where traffic comes from on the internet. Google keeps careful track of millions of websites that use their Analytics Tool, and while you can probably mentally modify the numbers a tiny bit because Google has a tendency to support themselves, their results say that 80% of all website traffic comes from Google searches.

That’s a HUGE number. Even if you dock them fifteen percent for the Google self-promotion spin, somewhere around two of every three visits to websites across the entire world come from Google. Why, then, do we waste so much effort on marketing tactics that aren’t organic SEO?

There are obviously some good answers — if you’re already making a billboard and you have space, why not add your URL? — but there are plenty of bad ones, too. For example, so-called ‘shotgun’ email marketing (i.e. emailing lists of addresses that you purchase from listholders) have a success rate in the one fiftieth of one percent range. That’s pathetic.

A single first page placement on Google for a keyword that gets a thousand hits a day — even if it’s the bottom-most spot on the page — will net you as many visitors in a week as sending out an unfocused email marketing spam to one hundred thousand email addresses. Get yourself into the top spot of the same page, and you’re looking at sending an email out to everyone in North America to get that kind of visitation rate.

The simple facts are, when you do all of the cost-benefit analysis, there’s only two systems that make real sense to use. One is pay-per-click marketing, and that only really works for businesses that have a lot of money up front. Organic SEO is the route by which the vast majority of successful websites get the vast majority of their traffic — so quit beating around the bush and get an SEO company on your side today.