As many of you have surely heard Google has made the declaration that they are changing the way they will report search traffic to website owners.
The bottom line is that if someone is signed into their Google account and then does a google search and ends up at your website, their search query will not show up in your analytics.
So what does this mean for internet marketing?
I personally have always held the belief that it is more important to be proactive than reactive. I don’t necessarily base my internet marketing decisions based on what has already happened, but rather what I want to have happen.
I admit that not knowing how much traffic a certain key phrase is actually bringing will make it harder to determine which phrases to target more aggressively, but the fact that google is doing this plays right into my theory of going after long tail key phrases when I do SEO.
If you put all of your eggs in one key phrase basket then this change might effect you more that it would me. What ultimately matters to me is that I get traffic that converts into sales. In the end I don’t care if they searched donkey socks or internet marketing, as long as they buy my product.
So what should you do?
Do exactly what you have been doing. Create good content, build quality links and test your landing pages to increase conversions. I guess not much has changed has it.
My friend Mark Butler who runs the Keyword Academy keeps telling me about all of these members he has that are making anywhere from $1000-$5000 a month just from Adsense. I asked him to show me what exactly they were doing and so he walked me through their methodology and I have to admit that I was really impressed. So impressed in fact that I decided to try it out for myself.
I know that I have talked about how Adsense should be used as a supplementary income stream on a website and not a main income source but if I can make $1k-$5k a month from one website with just Adsense, I am willing to rethink my position on the matter.
The great thing about Adsense is that you don’t have to count on a conversion to make money. In other words, all you have to do is get the traffic to your site and have them click on the ads on your site and your part is done. With other affiliate programs you have to get someone to actually buy something before you will get paid. You can potentially make more money with affiliate programs but there is a lot less friction to get some to make a click than to make a purchase.
From a buying websites perspective, Adsense sites are for sale everywhere, and they are really cheap. It will probably be much easier to find a good Adsense site candidate for a reasonable price thus creating a quick turnaround.
I really like Mark’s traffic generating strategy and I will continue to keep you updated as the site I started gets older and starts getting traffic and click$. Who knows, Prosperly may become Prospersense when all is said and done.
You may have noticed that Google’s search results are a little different. If you have a gmail account, google adwords, google adsense, or google analytics account then most likely you are signed in under your account name when you go to Google’s home page.
If that is the case then Google has added a new feature to their search results. They call it Search Wiki. Google offers you the option of promoting or deleting search results. In other words if you do a search and find certain results to be more helpful than others, then you promote them to the top of your results.
Here is a snapshot of what it looks like:
I first noticed this when I was checking to see where a certain term was ranking for one of my websites. I saw that I could delete all of my competitors listings and promote mine to the top. What a great idea. Wrong. About a week later I was checking rankings again and low and behold and to my surprise my site was ranking #1 for my main term. I was so excited I gave my brother a high 5 and hugged my wife.
There was one problem, no increase in traffic. If anything, the traffic was lower than normal. So I checked rankings on another computer…there we were at number 6. I checked all of Google’s datacenters and each one showed us at #6. I had completely forgotten that I had “promoted” my site to the top position and now unless I sign out of my google account I can’t see where I actually rank.
So in conclusion, as fun as it might be to promote your own site to the top spot and delete out your competitors, it doesnt serve any purpose to do that and you won’t be able to check your true rankings anymore.
