Is it still worth doing search engine marketing?
Editor’s note: This article comes with WeChat public number “Lightyear Laboratory”, author Guo Ping. 36 may be authorized to reprint.
Hello everyone, I am Guoping. I have been doing traffic for 16 years. Before 2010, I was responsible for free traffic growth at Alibaba International Station, and the daily UV of overseas B2B free traffic was several million. Later, a Party B company called Guangnian Lab (formerly known as Hangzhou Guangnian) was established. It is a traffic consultant for more than 40 mainstream large Internet companies such as Ctrip and Alibaba Cloud.
In addition, there have been few other projects in the past few years, including e-commerce (independent B2C website), e-commerce system (similar to praise), and mobile app (social direction).
When you come to the “group ring”, as long as you can participate in the party, I have heard a lot of very interesting traffic games. Let’s not say that “interlacing is like a mountain” in different industries, that is, in the field of traffic, there may be many subdivisions, and the information between everyone is very isolated. The channels and gameplay of traffic are always changing, but there are also some constant things, such as the game between the platform and the content creator, the mentality of everyone looking at the platform (in fact, not necessary), and the underlying mode of various traffic games.
The first thing I shared was a very popular traffic channel in the past, the search engine, to see how traffic can be gained in the current mobile Internet era and the new media era.
The first topic is: Is it still worth doing search engine marketing?
The conclusion is: It is worth doing, but if you don’t understand the current status of Baidu in China, 99% of people’s ROI will be very poor. As for Google overseas, it is still the number one source of traffic for most people.
First of all, why is it worth doing?
What you may not know is that in search engines, more than 65% of traffic comes from the mobile side, so don’t think that search engines are representative of PC traffic. Baidu’s DAU is not falling, DAU is more than 300 million, and everyone will search on the mobile phone.
I like to divide traffic into “search traffic” and “social traffic”, which correspond to “people looking for information” and “information looking for people”. My point is that there is no primary or secondary difference between the two modes of accessing information.
Just in China, Baidu’s relative market share is falling all the way. First, Taobao, where to go, etc., have taken a lot of vertical search traffic, followed by Weibo, WeChat, and Vibrato, and other social platforms have emerged. Baidu does not have It was so important before.
There are more than a quarter of the total UV (including APP) of several head Internet companies we serve.Traffic comes from search engines. Customers can’t use it as a case, but there is an example of a public channel that can be found: Knowing that there are more than 40 million total UVs per day for a certain period of time, there are 13 million UVs from search engines.
The conversion rate of search engine traffic has always been the highest among all traffic channels. Because the nature of social media traffic is “walking”, and search engine traffic is active “search.” Search engine traffic in the case of keyword and content matching, there are many examples of how to achieve about 10% conversion.
The search engine traffic is then relatively stable and controllable, and traffic like SEO Natural Ranking does not cost money. This is why the head Internet company pays more attention to this piece. Not to mention them, it is the medium-sized Internet company that sells traffic as a business model. For example, Rong 360 and Tuba Rabbit are the representatives of it. Every day, Baidu gets more than one million SUV free traffic from Baidu.
At the end of the day, there are still some dividends that few people have known before. This is the key point to be discussed later today.
Why do people who say that most people do search engine traffic will have a poor ROI, so look at the so-called inside story from the natural ranking (SEO) and the bidding ranking (PPC).
Search engine marketing is divided into two parts: natural ranking and bidding ranking. Natural ranking is non-advertising ranking. It is determined by the system according to certain algorithms who should be ranked first. The bidding ranking is the Buying Ranking (PPC), which ranks your ads based on how much you spend and who the user prefers. Of course, Baidu mainly depends on who spends more money.
For natural rankings, its return period should be one year later, and many people expect a good effect in a few months; then there is no professional person in either the company or the company in the entire industry. The search engine marketing service provider industry is generally an industry that is reversed.
And Baidu’s own page accounts for nearly a third of the search results, and the remaining traffic heads are obvious, that is, only large websites can get good traffic; in such a bad situation Baidu’s judgment on excellent content is seriously out of control, and many people quickly get a lot of traffic through some cheating methods.
The way in which the auction ranks this kind of money to buy a ranking is a chicken rib for many people. I personally think Baidu’s values are not very positive. They used the wrong way to guide everyone to advertise in the beginning. This may be a little alarmist, that is, accusing Baidu of its own interests, which has been misleading people to spend more money for more than a decade.
This is because the pattern of bidding rankings is decided. Only when everyone agrees that the flow of certain keywords is very large will compete for the word, and the public is rushing to think which words are important or not, such as Anyone who sells lipstick thinks that the word “lipstick” is not a vote, as if it were searchDo not do the traffic, Baidu will also push the boat to let everyone use this mode of thinking to advertise.
Specific case: I will give you two pictures, assuming that the customer is selling “Ejiao”:
In order to let everyone have an intuitive feeling, let me test everyone first: If you are the merchant who sells Ejiao, you go to Baidu to advertise, what keywords will you decide to buy?
This is the keyword selection method used by Baidu to train customers:
This method is to define some core words related to your business, such as donkey-hide gelatin, tonics, etc., then define some prefixes and suffixes, and then arrange them. The words that come out like this are:
Shanghai Ejiao Phone
Beijing Ejiao Phone
Shanghai Ejiao Website
……
Because everyone’s choice of words is the same, there will be competition, and the price of a few words that everyone can think of can be lifted.
And this is the keyword selection method we have been using all the time:
This is a lot of data mining tools. First, the whole industry users are searching for everything. It is necessary to exhaust the whole industry, the more the better, and then divide the core words into different groups. At this time, the user’s needs are Clearly listed before you.
From this data, it can be seen that the term “Ejiao” represents the entire category of words, and the daily search volume is only 8078. All industries in the search engine are like this, 80% of the words searched by users, the number of words is a lot. In fact, it is not difficult for everyone to think about it. Even a junior netizen understands that the word “Ejiao” does not search for what he wants. Most of the search engine search has a clear demand. Most people’s needs are personalized and unique.
But when the business is advertising, it is caught in a misunderstanding of thinking, thinking that the word “Ejiao” is particularly important. In fact, a category is important and does not mean that it is important to represent an industry keyword in this industry.
such as “iphone11 price” thisThe search volume of words far exceeds the word “mobile phone”; “163 mailbox” has a search volume of more than 100,000 a day, and the search volume of the word “free mailbox” is more than 3,000. The word “fiction” is not high in search volume. The word “TXT full novel download” has more than 1.6 million searches per day.
Baidu has not corrected everyone’s misunderstanding, so that everyone can follow this mentality to buy keywords. For more than a decade, many people have been doing SEO in accordance with this misunderstanding.
The second picture is the data I obtained from Baidu on October 28, 2019. Every day, Baidu’s real search for “Ejiao” related keywords is basically here. No matter how you want to break your head, you can’t think of users searching like this. The data in Figure 2, even some people who have been engaged in 10 years of search engine traffic operations, have never seen it.
The traffic bonus I mentioned earlier is that the industry has been using the wrong method for search engine traffic for so many years, so even today, there is still more than half of the traffic on the search engine. I will send a few more pictures, and everyone will know when they go to search.
(The daily search volume here refers to the total number of traffic in the previous 30 days on the day of querying this data divided by 30 days, which gives the average daily search volume of the most recent month. The data is time-sensitive, so Use the latest data.)
The following are some of the older data.
Investment Finance:
Automotive industry:
Second topic: What kind of traffic world is search engine marketing?
Search engine marketing has been done for more than a decade. Now, what kind of traffic world is this?
First of all, the search engine is the best evidence of the “long tail theory”. The search engine does a deep understanding of the long tail utility. Google once published a data: Google’s more than one billion searches per day, if you exactly match the words that users searched, 15% of the search terms have never been searched in the past year.
Similar search like “how to ma”ke an automatic door in minecraft”, such a combination of words, 15% of the words every day for the past year, no one has been so combined to search. This situation, not only Google and Baidu are so, Taobao, Xiaohongshu, WeChat This is true in search.
If this is the case, you simply can’t say that I want to “do the ranking of a few hundred words” because the words are changing every day. I have seen too many teams actually holding dozens of words they have come up with to put in and do SEO. This is the case ten years ago, and it is still the case now.
A lot of people have asked me how to find people in search engine marketing. My advice is to end the interview as long as they ask the interviewer a question. That is to ask the other party what the target keywords are when doing search engine marketing.
Divided into several horizontal segments:
less than a thousand words—-not yet started;
1 to 30,000 words—-most of them are trained in standard tutorials;
30,000 to 100,000 words—only this stage can be considered for recruitment;
100,000 to 500,000 words—-qualified for a very small business category;
500,000 to 5 million words—-one like this can have less than one interview a year.
On the search engine, finding 500,000 words belonging to a certain industry is definitely a strong ability. The actual amount of light to find 500,000 is not enough. If you want to do a good job, you should find the best value for money and the freshest words. If there are people who are posting search engine ads on the spot, compare the number of keywords in the backstage of your company and know where you are currently.
Search engines actually have a broad match mechanism, but if you cast too few words, the broad match mechanism won’t save you, and there are a lot of unconverted words that are wasting money.
The scene is currently doing a lot of new media industry. If you are a beauty make-up, your goal is to promote your products with the beauty KOL on the red book. Assume that the official book of the Red Book has a total of 20,000 data collected by all the beauty in the background, and now you only have more than 20 KOLs, and your opponent has more than 1,000. (Ignore the operating costs of more than 1000 KOLs first. Unlike the KOL marketing of Redskins, the traffic cost of buying a word is very low on search engines.) This is exactly the same as doing it on a search engine.
Similar, I don’t know if everyone disagrees. I’m still looking for a big V cooperation. If it’s an effect advertisement, it’s the kind of person who used to buy the “Ejiao” keyword on the search engine. low.
Alibaba’s traffic growth team was established in 2002, and now the search engine can be viewed on a web page:
https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/showroom.html
Everyone clicks on the A letter. Here are the keywords starting with A. One page is 120 words, and the A letter has 22429 pages. A to Z is a total of more than 20 million words.
Before I was responsible for this, I was able to determine that each word’s daily traffic has reached a certain amount of search, which means that it is a more important word. At that time, our mantra was “adding words equals adding traffic.” I remember that I bought more than 30,000 high-quality words from a company that sells words abroad, and then we completed the KPI for one quarter.
By the way, in fact, this method can also be used to make products.
For example, in the tourism industry, there was a well-known website at that time. We extracted about 5 million words from the entire tourism industry, and then we grouped and classified them as before, and we knew the demands of most users in this industry.
When you can analyze 5 million words on a search engine, it’s basically full data, which can at least represent the appeal of more than half of the industry. This can be a great application for big data. Later, through this batch of data, I found that the tourism industry will definitely not live well if you go to the Raiders category, because the demand for Raiders is very late. As a result, everyone now sees that some of the apps that do the Raiders are struggling on the edge of profitability.
Then everyone looks at the vocabulary data of the previous automotive industry. Since 2015, “SUV” and “Seven Blocks” have been the real hot spots in this industry, but many car Internet companies don’t know this.
Then look at a page in Alibaba:
https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/mp3.html
</p>
<p>For example, a traffic outsourcing company that is now on the market, we used to circulate their plans as jokes in the office. When their earnings come from the percentage of the amount of advertising you place, the more you pay, the higher your income and the difference in benefits, and there may be incentives for refined optimization. Because there are too many accounts for Party A, and these accounts are basically the outsourcing companies in which the interns are operating, not too much. </p>
<p>With my limited entrepreneurial experience, products and traffic should be the part of the company executives who spend the most time. I have seen many good user growth teams for so many years, and to a large extent they have achieved those companies. For example, I know Zhang Yiming, the headline of today, earlier than everyone. When they did cool news in 2006, the traffic was done very well, and even one method became the industry’s usual side.law. </p>
<p>At that time, Kuxun made a train ticket inquiry. They generated hundreds of thousands of different web pages from a fixed train query data, and these pages all hit many queries “Shanghai to Nanjing.” The traffic of such a train ticket can be calculated from the previous case. This kind of traffic is a big head, and the “train ticket” is too high in word traffic, so the search engine traffic of Cool News is very high. Ok. </p>
<p>This practice has gained a lot of traffic even after being copied by Xinxin Travel Network ten years later. </p>
<p>The operation method is specific: http://huoche.cncn.com/</p>
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This method was later summed up as: When your industry has some data that can be queried from the intrinsic database, please web it to hit the keywords of the search engine, and then the traffic is yours.
Sometimes someone put the QQ number, postal code, mobile phone number, weather forecast, etc. into the webpage, which is a lot of traffic.
At the beginning of the day, after the launch of the headline APP, more than 9 million installations were made in more than a month. This is the performance that the team that is good at traffic can achieve. The “Today’s Headlines” app used to crawl traffic to more than 5,000 websites and then do traffic, similar to the way the stationmasters of the early webmasters were. Everyone thinks about how vibrating the app itself is, how can there be no traffic growth team doing a lot of work behind.
SEO, you should make full use of Baidu to give nearly one-third of the traffic to your product. Baidu Q&A, Baidu Post Bar, Baidu Library, Baijiahao and even Baidu.com, etc., all have your content. When you have the above vocabulary, the vocabulary is the user’s search needs, and the high and low search volume has already told you all. Then you only need some common sense to spread the content in Baidu’s channels. Just think about how to put your content on it.
The recent traffic bonus is a small Baidu program, which is the same as the previous Baijia number. I personally think this is Baidu’s last wave of dividends.
Baidu also gave a lot of big stations a high weight, such as knowing, Sohu from the media, CSDN (you are not mistaken), etc., this is also the trend in overseas Google, this is not the search engine eccentricity, and After a long period of evolution, there will be more good content creators. We can go to the above to spread the content and convert users.
Everyone has to give up and must use their own website.The idea of doing traffic, traffic must be more and more concentrated in the head, the idea of turning your own website into a traffic center is becoming more and more unrealistic, especially for small stations that have no advantage. So you can safely be a content contributor on someone else’s platform, contribute content on these platforms, and then transfer these pages to any other platform to drain. The way I have been talking about before is to “make content flow in the middle of the channel.”
Take Ejiao as an example, you can do this:
From the above vocabulary can be seen: “Where is the gelatin cake suitable for people to eat” There are more than 20,000 searches a day, go to Baidu, the word, I am now searching in Hangzhou, found that an advertisement is not voted . (Do not rule out other places or when you see it may be)
At this time, you should go to know, Baijia, Sohu from the media, Baidu know, Baidu applet and other channels to appear in your soft text, which is recommending your product. After doing this, you have to compete with the current front page to compete for rankings, as long as some simple SEO techniques such as “anchor bombing” or “external link”, or even the most original “keyword density”, you go up. The chances are very big, and then the traffic is yours.
Of course, if the word is discovered by others, it will also become the Red Sea, so your response is to find more blue sea words, or directly to grab a few people are competing. Also, the top three Baidu question and answer in the picture, you will have a lot of traffic even if you answer it now.
For so many years, Baidu still has a lot of traffic no one wants. This point Baidu actually killed himself. You see, although Baidu has made many people buy words at high prices, and the income is also a lot, but Baidu’s many traffic has not been sold. Equivalent to traffic, there is still a lot of inventory, traffic is not fully commercialized, and advertisers do not get a good ROI in high-priced traffic, which is a double lose.
Today’s headlines have done a lot better at this point. The flow of information flow is still more concentrated than Baidu. The huge engine of the headline is now developing a lot of features so that everyone’s delivery is as staggered as possible.
If you are an APP and have a lot of content, you must find a front-end engineer to web content and do basic SEO, which can be a lot of traffic. For example, today’s headline SEO is still not good enough for me, the content is also repeated, but it should not be a problem to get millions of days of UV in Baidu.
There are a lot of skills that can’t be explained in a short time, affecting S