Websites can also make money on advertising only. Here's what it takes today to run a money-making, high-quality content website.

SEO originated as a magic drug to “make money online.” Most SEO pioneers were bloggers and webmasters, and most of them were trying to make money by collecting ad revenue instead of selling online items. The industry shifted dramatically as SEO practitioners set up companies and started providing their services to e-commerce sites and conventional businesses.

Nevertheless, the ad-supported business model has grown and has undergone many changes in the industry. Today, AdSense alone makes $15.5 billion a year for Google. And what’s it going to take to run a money-making web platform today? Why did things change? Let’s just take a look.

1. Ad Revenues Are Stronger Than Ever

MFA or “Made for AdSense” was a form of a website designed to target unique keywords that earned high bids in AdWords. In the wake of the MFA site algorithm updates, the path to revenue changed from hacking keywords to creating content. Nowadays, the opportunities to make content money are better than ever before.

There is certainly advertising revenue, more than in the days of the MFA. Online advertising spending outperformed TV in 2017, and there’s no reason you can’t make a decent amount of money with ads on your pages.

As far as ad networks are concerned, you should certainly expand your ad revenue sources beyond AdSense by now. You can start by adding Media.net ads, which will extend your network to include DSGB-compliant Yahoo! and Bing background ads, as well as giving you access to a dedicated account manager and other benefits.

Through there, you can start capitalising on re-targeting networks and partnering with affiliate networks and eventually start developing personal relationships with sellers.

So, how are you supposed to approach this?

2. Select High Revenue Keywords

In the modern advertising world, it makes no sense to think about keyword importance in the same way. Most display ads are tailored to user context, not search requests, so bidding doesn’t work the same way.

You should turn your attention away from bid prices and start thinking more about the audience.

If you want to make a lot of money from ad clicks, you need to build audiences that spend a lot of money. There are many ways to do this, such as targeting women and children who do most shopping, targeting CEOs and corporate executives with big-ticket spending habits. The right solution will be unique to your business, and the key insight is to think in terms of markets, both in terms of size and willingness to spend money.

You will also need to move away from targeting specific keywords and towards targeting the long tail, a large collection of miscellaneous keywords that make up most of the searches. The long tail picks up more and more of the search results every day as people embrace the quest for speech. A good content site catches this long tail traffic by producing comprehensive content designed to address as many of the search questions as possible.

A good way to identify these types of questions is to:

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  • Take a look at the questions in the “Similar searches” portion of the search results.
  • Using resources such as Keyword.io to define autocomplete suggestions.
  • Visit Quora and other Q&A pages to find out which questions people are asking about the subject in question.
  • Check the forums for questions people ask about the subject.
  • Check the correct social media to find the questions people are asking about the issue.

Developing a robust content pipeline that tackles these concerns is the best way to rate the long tail in areas that are relevant to your target audiences.
Consider breaking the content into a variety of small pages, unless it is for the good of the customer. Don’t try targeting any long query on a separate page unless there is a user-focused reason to do so, particularly if you target keyword variations that mean the same thing.

3. Adhere to Google’s Content Quality Guidelines

Google algorithms are programmed to replicate the evaluation of sites by human content raters. When you create content designed to get a high quality rating from a human user, you’re creating content that will perform well in Google’s algorithms. You can access the Google Performance Rating Guidelines here.

Here are a few of the takeaways:

 

  • Do not allow advertisements to block or confuse users into believing that advertisements are part of the main content.
  • The content of the page on the search result page is measured by how well its intent is matched with the needs of the searcher. Identify the intent associated with any queries that you directly target and build your page to better serve that function than any other search result.
  • The text should be easily legible and minimally distracting.
  • Your main content needs to be easily identifiable, length-satisfactory for the purpose of the page, comprehensive, and a significant amount of time, effort, or skill should be evident.
  • Google does not expressly require a “nice” design but requires the design to be practical so that it meets the intent of the website.
  • Expertise, competence, and trustworthiness are included in the ranking. If it comes to topics that require expertise, it is important to ensure that your content creator is an expert on the subject. Where this is not possible, quotations are a must.
  • Your site should have a good online reputation based on reviews and discussions.
  • It should be easy to identify who creates the content and easy to verify that it is someone who is authoritative and trustworthy on the subject in question.
  • That should be self-evident, but any accurate details you give should be reliable and true.
  • Supplementary material, i.e. navigation and recommended posts, should be easy to interact with and make sense no matter which page of the web you land on.
  • Avoid material with unnecessary verbiage that exists only to count the word.

Conclusion

Websites can still make money solely on advertising, but the bar is high and the emphasis must be on users and viewers. Invest in trustworthy content and it’s still possible to create a digital empire.