MarkBeljaars.com

SEO is one of those games that you can spend a lot of time at for very little reward. It is all too common for new players to spend hundreds of hours promoting a website using backlink building techniques only to find that traffic does not equal conversion. Wouldn’t it be great if you could measure how well your site will convert before spending all those hours? Well, there is one method that is commonly used for this very purpose. With almost no effort at all you can drive several hundred visitors to your site within a couple of days. The catch…it costs money.

For those who are fortunate enough to have a spare hundred dollars or so, it is wise to spend that money up front to test your niche before spending precious hours on a dead end. The simplest way to do this is to create a Google Adwords campaign. The advantage of this method is that you can run the campaign to generate 500 or so visitors, then immediately end it. Statistically, 500 visitors will enable you to review the worth of your niche. Simply divide the number of sales by the number of visitors to obtain your conversion ratio. Through experience, I have found the following:

• Conversion Radio < 1% – forget it, you will be wasting your time pursuing this niche unless you replace your product, site copy or both.
• Conversion Ratio < 1.5% – your niche has potential. Generally we look for a minimum natural conversion ratio of around 1%. Adwords artificially inflates this result as people who click on ads normally do so to buy. Therefore, an Adwords conversion of 1.5% is marginal.
• Conversion Ratio > 1.5% – go for it. You have a good niche and your time will certainly be justified.

Creating an Adwords campaign is very easy and can be done in less than 10 minutes. If you are serious about SEO, you will have already performed your keyword research and will have a couple of 2-3 word target keywords and several long-tail keywords. These keywords should be used in your AdWords campaign. Be prepared to spend money though. I find that a limit of $60 per day and a cost per click high enough to propel your add into positions 3 to 5 works well. Create several ad copies and don’t be tempted to add loads of keywords. Use only the keywords you have chosen for your niche as these will be the keywords you will target naturally if your Adwords campaign proves yours niche valuable.

Run your campaign only until you generate 500 visitors. If you are targeting expensive keywords, 250 visitors will also provide an acceptable statistical guide. Be prepared to spend between $100 and $200 US. It is expensive, but if it saves you 100 hours of work, that is only $1 or $2 per hour.

In my next article I will discuss how to create an AdWords campaign and most importantly how to create a successful AdWords ad copy.

Alexa “The web information company” specializes in the collection of Internet based information and freely releases a daily updated Internet popularity ranking called the Alexa Ranking. This measure is often used by SEO marketers and affiliate merchants as a gauge of a sites popularity, and hence its earning potential. Alexa ranks sites from 1 to 5 million+. Sites in the top 10 include Google, Youtube and Facebook. Amazon ranks around 20. The full list is available here and the top 1 million sites can also be downloaded as a CSV file.

Alexa derives site popularity by determining the overall percentage of Internet users who visit a site in any given day. For example, Alexa has determined that 0.001% of all Internet users visited my site yesterday, and therefore that earns me a ranking of 385,625 meaning that there are 385,000+ sites that receive more traffic than mine. Overall this is a great result for a site that is less than 3 months old, but it is not correct as I will explain below.

Alexa gains traffic information from users who have installed the free Alexa toolbar. When a user installs the toolbar, the user is requested to supply information such as gender, age, education and so on. Once installed, the toolbar offers information to surfers as they visit sites such as 6 month traffic trending, ranking and so on. The information gleamed from users is alo available to webmasters to help determine visitor demographics. My statistics are shown below…

Astute readers may have noticed that there is a major flaw in the Alexa Rankings. People who tend to install toolbars are more savvy than your average Internet user and as such Alexa Ranking results are heavily skewed towards technical sites such as mine. For this very reason, Alexa Rankings should not be used as a golden measure of a sites popularity but instead be looked upon as a rough guide.