The search engine playing field is no longer level. Small and medium size online retailers can find it difficult if not impossible to match what the “big boys” spend on Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising and other Search Engine Marketing (SEM) these days. Over time, the millions spent by the top advertisers slowly drive the smaller sites from the market simply because PPC is unsustainable in most markets for top keywords, especially in a highly competitive industry like health supplements. Only in rare cases can a well-managed PPC campaign yield profitable results, yet when you factor in the cost of the management it makes it tough to squeeze out any profit at all.
In the good ol’ days, SEO was the easy answer; throw in a few keywords, some backlinks and you were done. However, search engines have gotten a lot smarter and much better at delivering targeted results so users rarely need to look past the first or second page to find what they are looking for. The results are usually the same, a mix of major retailers, shopping engines, Amazon, and maybe some articles or videos and that’s it, aside from expensive PPC ads. From this first page the user is normally able to quickly compare prices from several major vendors offering the same product or service and choose the best deal within minutes, and that can be reduced to seconds if Google shows shopping results for the keyword as they often do for product searches.
It does not take a marketing expert to know that If a site is not found in the top 15 search results the site will simply not have enough traffic to sustain itself over time and the fact is that nowadays any manual attempt at gaining top placement for highly competitive keywords is a long and arduous process at best, and since old “black-hat” techniques can get a site banned, business owners are often left with few options, until now….