Thread: Buying keywords

What kind of growth have you guys experienced with buying keywords? How many do you recommend a business buys?

I don't understand what you mean?

I thought that you can go to google and buy keywords for your site, which would help with SEO. Am I off on this?

The two sites that I've come across that are have similar sites both claim to have over 17,000 keywords. That seemed way excessive to me. Any thoughts?

...And yes, I was confused over organic and bidding on keywords. Thanks for straightening me out.

here is my experience as limited as it may be...

bid on your top 5 keywords such a cabin rentals, cabin vacations, etc.

Then search the top five keywords. Pick the top organic results under each on, i.e. cabin vacations results that are not competition, and buy ads on those sites if they allow it.

My bounce rate on the display ads on related sites is way lower than the google cpc, and it has greatly improved my keyword stats as well.

It can be helpful to know what people are searching for and a tool like this can be useful http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

If I'm not mistaken, these are daily numbers.

Thanks guys-

Both the wordtracker site and the idea of buying ads on related organic sites was very helpful. ++rep.

Just our of curiousity, would you say that if a site had bid on 17,000 keywords doing so would largely be a waste of money?

There is a difference between keywords and targeted keywords. Just as with everything, quality is better than quantity. A formula to follow when deciding is figure AT BEST you will pay a nickel for every click on a word. How many words are worth a nickel? Remember some words will cost you over a dollar and more too.

You can get free advertising by writing articles. When you submit an article, Ezinearticles is the big one, you get a link to your site on every article. Links to your site help with SEO. Additionally, with articles you can create word pictures about your place that make people want to go and stay there. You could also find other travel websites that accept articles and they have targeted traffic, people who travel or want to travel.

With an article you can sell them on the surrounding area, the charm, history etc., and as a side note tell them yours is the place to stay. Writing the articles themselves may not be fastlane, but you can outsource too. Just something to think about.

Great feedback! rep++

We are planning to have a weekly blog, a monthly newsletter and a forum. We would also like to feature different travel writers or guest blogs on our site. I am open to submitting articles as well- really, we are open to any ideas to get our site launched with a focus being more on organic SE results.

Originally Posted by ^eagle^

I pared my list down to 15 phrases and hold the ".net" URL for the top three.
I plan to redirect those to one site. Once my testing was done I paused my adwords account.
For now, My number 2 and number three URL's are consistently in the top ten organically.

I'll soon build a duplicate site for my number one URL. This will be my new sales page and I'll redirect number two and three. I;ll also reactivateadwords when I'm ready to sell and blitz the market.

So you bought the .net URL for the top three hoping for type-in traffic?

If so, when you redirect them, why are you redirecting to a duplicate site for your number one URL and not your "original" site?

...Great, great info here! This is all so fascinating.

I have experienced tremendous growth from utilizing Google's PPC keywords. So much so, we now spend 5 digits per month on 'buying' keywords.

The 17,000 keyword strategy utilizes 'long tail', and can be very profitable due to low competition. This way, you can target very specific keywords that are niche to you, but not so much to your competitors. Due to low competition, they will also be much, much cheaper than the main generic keywords.

Ultimately, keyword bidding is all about ROI, and should be based off your average ticket sale and gross margin. For us, we utilize a 20% revenue marketing budget to calculate in how much to spend on PPC. You can then calculate how many 'clicks' you can get before you need one conversion .. at that point, you just work on improving your landing pages ..