A High Rankings Forum member had a chat with a snakeoil salesman who promised to guarantee 3000 searches a month for a client's particular niche. How is this possible without using some shady tactics?
Numerous possibilities arise. They could just be using "over-inflated Overture numbers," as forum administrator Jill Whalen explains. Moderator Randy says that it could just be numbers generated from collecting AdWords impression data. You could also get an idea about the number of searches (though nobody is sure how accurately) through Google Trends.
What, then, could it be? After the forum member actually spoke with the company, he learned that it has nothing to do with these numbers: instead, it's about PPC ads.
As I understand it, the sponsored links above the organic results are PPC just like the PPC on the right hand side - please correct me if I'm wrong. The sales rep from this company told me that they pay £xxx,xxx per month to Google, who guarantee x number of slots in these ads for any keyphrases they choose. This is not PPC and the customer pays £20 per month per keyword, regardless of whether it gets 1 click or 1,000,000 clicks.After the first month (which has a compulsory number of 5 keyphrases) Google issues metrics and the customer can view these to decide if they want more, less or even no keyword adverts at all for the following month(s)
Is it worth the hassle? Not so much. Jill says that it "[s]ounds like they are simply repackaging Google AdWords." And I'm inclined to agree.
Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.
