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While speaking with a group of top notch Internet people at a conference last week , the discussion came around to SEO vs SEM.
For those of you who may not completely understand the terminology, it is comparing Search Engine Optimisation which attracts free traffic to your site over the long term, vs Search Engine Marketing which is getting your credit card out to buy a Pay Per Click campaign on Google Adwords for immediate but expensive traffic today.
We at Global have never bought traffic on a consistent basis, in fact in 10 years we have probably not even invested 1,000$. We have done testing like every company should do to understand how differing systems work and establish what the ROI is for a particular campaign.
As an example, from my experience I can tell you that spending the same money on Facebook ads and Google Adwords will net you the same amount of click thrus back to your website. But on Facebook it takes as much as 6X the ad impressions.
This backs up the idea that Facebook users are not looking at ads as much as on other sites and therefore the costs are much much cheaper for an ad.
When looking back I realized that we did a great post on SEO and the Long Tail of Search back in 2008 but I never followed up with one to show the growth in 2009.
As a refresher, The Long Tail of Search refers to keyword referrals that you may only receive a few or maybe even one referral over the course of 12 months.
For comparison in 2008 we had 587,013 different keyword and phrase combinations sending traffic from Search Engines.
In 2009 that number increased to 793,082 keyword combinations with the top keywords being :
* Farm Auctions
* Farm Auction Guide
* Iowa Auctions
* Global Auction Guide
* Wisconsin Auctions
* Nebraska Auctions
* Ohio Auctions
* Michigan Auctions
* Minnesota Auctions
* Local Auctions
* Manitoba Auctions
* Real Estate Auctions
* Florida Auctions
* Indiana Auctions
* Colorado Auctions
* Texas Auctions
* Alberta Auctions
* Illinois Auctions
* Missouri Auctions
* Oklahoma Auctions
What is most interesting is that the total number of individual keywords increased , the traffic to many of the top keywords increased as well giving an overall big spike in overall pageviews from Search Engine traffic.
There are competitors on some forums who call into question how companies like Global or even AuctionZip.com can generate the traffic levels we advertise . It is not hard to see how with a proper white hat SEO strategy you can generate a huge amount of traffic to upcoming auction sales, and we pride ourselves on being able to deliver potential bidders to your sales.
I will do another post later next month with final 2010 numbers, but I can already see that we will surpass 2009 numbers significantly and we will have a new #1.
But will it be Iowa or Nebraska on top ?
