This is the third in a series of articles by J Keightley who is a professional life coaching specialist and ecommerce business owner of Giggleberries Mens Underwear, which exactly what it takes to get on to page one of Google.

So, now we know exactly where we stand with Google and where we need to be if we want search engines to draw traffic to our site, particularly if this is the primary marketing strategy for increasing your site visits.

However, how do we get on to page one and better still, how do we get in to SERP 4 or higher. There are two ways; the costly and easy way or the cheap and difficult way. I have tried both and as a small business owner the only option for me at the time was the cheap and difficult way. However, I have come to believe that this can also be the best way, because it is the most lasting, sturdy and permanent method.

Let me explain. There are two ways in which your website can appear in the google search results. One is as what we call a ‘sponsored link’ and this is as a result of you setting up a Google Adword Campaign and paying on a cost per click (CPC) basis for your website to show up in the sponsored links results at the top of the google results page and down the right hand side of the google results page for particular words that you wish to be found for.

The cheaper preference is to work at getting your website listed in what are the none sponsored results in the main body of the page and what is commonly referred to as the ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ results. You don’t have to pay google for this, but it take time and hard work to attain this and I would advocate to most people that they need to be prepared to spend a minimum of 18 months continuous hard work on a number of strategies to get their site listed in these results. Remember, you are aiming to get to at least SERP 4 in the organic results.

Once there it takes a reasonable measure of effort for another website to come along and knock you off of your pedestal and providing you maintain your strategies the SERP you achieve remains relatively stable.

Now, I mentioned that I consider that the organic method can be the best approach. However, a sponsored Adword campaign may be more suitable in some circumstances because it can generate a lot of what are called ‘one way back links to your site’, which is one of the main strategies for getting your site listed organically in the long run. Let me explain. If you have a website that offers a very different product or service, so interesting that as soon as people learn about it, they will suddenly start shouting about it, it could have a viral effect whereby everyone on the internet starts posting comments and sharing the link to your site. Consequently, you can suddenly observe that you have a lot of websites linking to your site and basically saying, ‘checkout this great site I have found’. However, I would advocate that you need to be very confident in your product and believe that it would have such a profound affect that as soon as people discover it they will want to share the link to your site. It would need to be something like the formula to Coca Cola or how to turn crystals in to diamonds.

For most businesses the bottom line is that Adwords costs too much money in my opinion. Many companies who offer the service of setting up and managing your Google Adword campaign will sell it to you by demonstrating that they have got sites on to page one for only a small amount of money. However, often the keyword (something I will discuss later) they use to prove this are ones that there isn’t much competition for and usually your site will achieve a good SERP for this in any case with good search engine optimisation of your website or little or no internet marketing.

For example one of my keywords is ‘HOM Underwear’, companies have quoted me to set up an adwords campaign to get on to page one of google for this. Yet, if you go to google.co.uk and search for this you will note that my site ‘giggleberries’ ranks on page one for this and all I have done is search engine optimisation and very little internet marketing for it. The keyword I really want page one for is ‘mens underwear’ and this is much harder to achieve and that is why prospective adword management consultant will not use it to prove what they can achieve for me because they know it will cost a lot of money.

If you are pondering on running an adwords campaign then only use it for your most competitive keywords, as you can achieve page one with the less competitive ones yourself for free. If you are going to use adwords for your competitive keywords then you need to be looking at a minimum of a £1000 budget a month, and I would personally only consider this if your though that you would only need to run it for a month for it to have the viral effect.

So, there are your options and I imagine that by now you are starting to think that the organic route is probably the best. For me, I preferred to use a strategy that achieves a more stable and lasting organic position and to spend my money on other areas.

In my next article we are going to talk about some of the approaches to achieving the best possible organic SERP.

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