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Comment by paulcole | Hacker News Reader

What actual, measurable results have you seen?

Is your business doing better than it was before you started? If so, what do you attribute those improvements to?

Like 10-20% increase in organic search traffic. Yes, technically it’s an improvement but not enough to justify the investment. We also have separate PR efforts (traditional media), so it’s hard to tell.

How closely have you looked at the data besides the increase?

Are these visitors coming from countries where you actively want customers? What pages are these entrances landing on? What are people searching to end up on these pages? What are these people actually doing on your site? Are they converting?

We look at the data in GA, but it doesn’t paint a good picture because we only care about one country (US), have only a couple pages that matter, and conversions are mostly from paid sources not organic search. One of our biggest complaints is that the search terms are mostly branded ones, even though we’ve been asking the agency to focus on unbranded terms. It’s possible that we’re being impatient to see results with only 6 months under our belt.

I mean it seems like you have your answer.

SEO tricks and optimizations to rank for unbranded terms are very very very unlikely to work. Really the only thing that does work is creating useful content and in some cases creating a lot of it.

And remember SEO can't create demand where there is none. So if there's no KW volume for the terms you want you shouldn't be surprised if you're not getting a lot of results.

If there's demand and the bulk of the effort hasn't gone into creating good and useful content then you probably won't see any results no matter how long you wait.

Or why not put $6k/month into Google Ads for the unbranded terms and just buy the traffic you want?

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