If your ecommerce site depends on Google for profit, your business will hurt in the next two years.

What Google's been doing to SEOs

As I detailed in my last article, Google is steadily undermining the ROI on SEO, so that more people buy AdWords instead.

Google has:

• provided answers directly in search results,
• mixed in YouTube, news and other media types, and
• stopped giving keyword data on as much as 30% of organic traffic to a site.

… and those are just its best-known actions.

SEOs respond

Since there is a decreasing percentage of traffic available to SEO-ed sites, smart SEOs are already transitioning out of relying on SEO traffic for profit. They're using it to acquire customers, period.

Everyone knows that repeat customers are easier to sell to and they buy more. So make an initial low-profit sale to search visitors. You can then add them to your email list and make more sales and profit later.

In fact, in my previous email I went so far as to advocate selling at cost — i.e. at 0% profit — to maximise your conversion rate on SEO traffic.

Since you want search traffic on all your products, wouldn't you price everything at 0% profit?

How will you ever be profitable then? Ah! Challenge the assumption that all your products want or depend on search traffic!

The reason for cutting into margins is that search traffic is going away. What if there weren't search traffic in the first place?

Surprisingly, that's the case for many products. Any new product doesn't have existing search demand.

Who looked for iPad phrases five years ago? Yet Apple built an audience of fans who loved its gadgets and made the iPad an instant best-seller.

I could go on but why repeat myself? Go read the full how-to on my blog.

Regards,

Gab Goldenberg

You can read about Gabriel’s services at his Web site, SEO ROI.