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.
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?
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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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.
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:
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