The title picture comes from Visual China, this article comes from WeChat public account: Light Year Labs (ID: gnlabs) < / a> , author: Guo-Ping

Hello everyone, my name is Guoping. I have been doing traffic for 16 years.

Before 2010, it was mainly responsible for the growth of free traffic at Alibaba International Station, and achieved the daily UV of free B2B traffic to millions. Later, a Party B company was set up called the Light Year Lab (formerly known as Hangzhou Light Year) , which is more than 40 mainstream large-scale companies such as Ctrip and Alibaba Cloud. Internet company’s traffic consultant. In addition, I have not tossed other projects in recent years. Among them, I have done e-commerce (Foreign trade independent B2C website) , I have done e-commerce system (Similar likes) , have done mobile APP (It’s not really necessary) , and the underlying modes of various traffic games.

The first thing I shared was a very mainstream traffic channel in the past-searchSearch engine to see how search engines can get traffic in this mobile internet era and new media era.

The first issue is: is it worthwhile to do search engine marketing now?

The conclusion is: it ’s worth doing, but if you do n’t understand the current status of the domestic Baidu ecology, 99% of people will have a poor ROI. As for Google overseas, it is still the number one source of traffic for most people.

First, why is it worth doing.

Everyone may not know that in search engines, more than 65% of the traffic comes from mobile terminals, so do not think that search engines are representative of PC traffic. Baidu’s DAU has not decreased. DAU is more than 300 million, and everyone will search on mobile phones.

I like to divide traffic into “search traffic” and “social traffic”, which correspond to “people looking for information” and “information looking for people”, respectively. My point is that these two modes of obtaining information are not the same.

Only in China, Baidu ’s relative market share has been declining. First, Taobao, where to go and so on took a lot of vertical search traffic, and then social platforms such as Weibo, WeChat, and Douyin have risen one after another. It was so important before.

The daily UV of several head internet companies we serve (including APP) , there is more than a quarter of the traffic From search engines. Customers can’t take it as a case, but there is an example that can be found through open channels: when the total daily UV of a certain period of time is more than 40 million, the UV from the search engine is 13 million.

The conversion rate of search engine traffic has always been the highest among all traffic channels. Because the nature of the traffic of social media is “shopping”, and the search engine traffic is “searching” actively. There are many examples of search engine traffic that have achieved conversions of around 10% when keywords and content match.

Then search engine traffic is relatively stable and controllable, and traffic such as SEO natural rankings does not cost money, which is why leading Internet companies pay more attention to this. Not to mention them, they are the medium-sized Internet companies that sell traffic as the business model, such as Rong 360 and Tubatu.Take SEO free traffic above one million UVs.

Finally, there are still some bonuses that were rarely known before. This is the key point to be discussed later today.

Why do most people do search engine traffic with poor ROI? You need to start from natural ranking (SEO) and bid ranking (PPC) Let’s look at the so-called inside story.

Search engine marketing is divided into natural ranking and auction ranking. Natural ranking is non-ad ranking, and the system decides who should be ranked first according to a certain algorithm. The auction position is to buy the position (PPC, Pay Per Click) , according to how much you spend money and which ads users prefer In front of course, of course, Baidu mainly depends on who spends more money.

For natural ranking, its payback period should be one year later, and many people expect good results in a few months.

Then the entire industry, neither Party A company or Party B company has very professional people. In general, the search engine marketing service provider industry is an industry that has been eliminated.

Also, Baidu’s own pages account for a third of the search results, and the remaining traffic has obvious head effects, that is, only large websites can get good traffic.

Under such a bad situation, Baidu ’s judgment on excellent content is seriously out of control, and many people have quickly obtained a lot of traffic through some cheating methods.

Bid auctions are a way of spending money to buy rankings. I personally think that Baidu’s values ​​are not very positive. They used the wrong method to guide everyone in advertising from the beginning. This may be a bit alarmist, which is to accuse Baidu for its own benefit. For more than ten years, it has been misleading everyone to spend more money.

This is because the bidding ranking model determines it. Only when everyone thinks that certain keywords have a lot of traffic, they will compete for the word, and the public will pat their heads to think which words are important. For example, anyone who sells lipstick thinks that if the word “lipstick” is not cast, it seems that search engine traffic should not be done, and Baidu will push it smoothly.Zhou 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 make everyone feel intuitive, let me test everyone first: Suppose 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 Ejiao, tonic, etc., then define some prefixes and suffixes, etc., and then arrange them. The words come out like this:

Ejiao Phone in Shanghai

Beijing Ejiao Phone

Shanghai Ejiao Website

…

Because everyone chooses the same word selection method, there will be competition, and the price of a few words that everyone can think of will definitely rise.

And this is the keyword selection method we have always used:

Here are a lot of data mining tools. First of all, the users in the entire industry are searching for everything. The entire industry must be exhausted. The more the better. Clearly listed in front of you.

From this data, we can see that the word “Ejiao” represents the entire category, and the daily search volume is only 8078. This is the case for all industries on search engines. 80% of the words searched by users are numerous. In fact, it is not difficult for everyone to think about it. Even a junior netizen understands that using words like “Ejiao” cannot find what he wants. Most of the search engine searches have clear Needs come, and most people’s needs have individuality and uniqueness.

But when a business advertises, it falls into a misunderstanding, thinking that the word “Ejiao” is particularly important. In fact, a category is important, does not mean that an industry keyword representing this industry is important.

For example, the search volume for the term “iphone11 price” far exceeds the term “mobile phone”; the search volume for the term “163 mailbox” is more than 100,000 a day, and the search volume for the term “free mailbox” is three thousand many. The word “fiction” is not highly searched, and the word “TXT full novel download” has more than 1.6 million searches every day.

Baidu hasn’t corrected everyone’s misunderstanding, and let everyone buy keywords in accordance with this thinking. For more than a decade, many people are doing SEO according to this misunderstanding.

The second picture is the data I got 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 if some people have been engaged in search engine traffic operations for 10 years, have never seen it.

The traffic dividend I mentioned earlier is that the industry has been doing search engine traffic in the wrong way for so many years, so that today, more than half of the traffic on search engines is not required. I will send a few more pictures, and everyone will know by searching.

(The daily search volume here refers to the total number of traffic in the previous 30 days before the date of querying this data divided by 30 days to get the most recent month. Daily average search volume. The data is time-sensitive, so use the latest data.)

Here is the older data.

Investment and wealth management:

Auto industry:

Second topic: What kind of traffic world is search engine marketing?

Search engine marketing has been done by a bunch of people for more than a decade. Now let ’s see what kind of traffic world this is.

First of all, the search engine is the best empirical evidence of the “long tail theory”. When doing traffic in the search engine, you must understand the long tail utility deeply. Google once released a statistic: In Google ’s billions of searches every day, if the exact words searched by users match, 15% of the search terms have never been searched in the past year. For example, similar to the search “how to make an automatic door in minecraft”, such a combination of words, 15% of words every day, no one has searched together in the past year. In this case, not only Google and Baidu, but also Taobao, Xiaohongshu and WeChat search.

If this is the case, you can’t even say that I want to “rank a few hundred words” because words change every day. I’ve seen too many teams and actually put dozens of words that they came up with to do placement and SEO. This was the case ten years ago, and it is still the same today.

Many people have asked me how to find someone in search engine marketing. My suggestion is that they can end as long as they ask the interviewer a question.Beam interview. That is to ask the other party how many target keywords when doing search engine marketing.

Divided into several horizontal sections:

Less than a thousand words-not yet started;

1,000 to 30,000 words-most of them are trained by standard courses;

30,000 to 100,000 words-Only at this stage can you consider hiring;

100,000 to 500,000 words-qualified for a very small business category;

500,000 to 5 million words—people like this have less than one interview each year.

On search engines, finding 500,000 words that belong to a certain industry is definitely a strong ability. The actual amount of 500,000 is not enough. If you want to do a good job, you have to find the best value for money and the freshest words. If there are people who are running search engine advertisements on the spot, compare how many keywords in your company’s backstage are investing to know your current stage.

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 will be a lot of unconverted words that are wasting money.

Currently, most of the scene is done in the new media industry. Assuming you are a beauty artist, your goal is to promote the beauty of KOL on Xiaohongshu product. Suppose Xiaohongshu officially pulls all the beauty professionals in the background. There are 20,000 statistics, and now you only have more than 20 KOLs, and your opponent has more than 1,000 (Ignore the operating costs of more than 1,000 KOLs here. Unlike the celebrity KOL marketing, the cost of buying a word of traffic is very low on the search engine) . This is exactly the same as running on a search engine.

Similarly, I do n’t know if everyone agrees or disagrees. Now I ’m still looking for cooperation with Big V. If it ’s for performance advertising, it ’s the kind of person who bought the keyword “Ejiao” on the search engine. The ROI is very low.

Alibaba ’s traffic growth team was established in 2002, and now you can see a webpage in the search engine level: https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/showroom.html


Everyone click on the A letter. Here are keywords that start with A. There are 120 words on one page. There are 22429 pages under the A letter. A to Z are more than 20 million words.

In the past, I was responsible. I was able to make sure that the daily traffic of each word reached a certain amount of search volume, that is, it was more important words. At that time, our mantra was “add words equals increase traffic.” I remember that I bought more than 30,000 high-quality words from a company specializing in selling words at that time, and then our quarterly KPI was completed.

By the way, 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 dug the word of the entire tourism industry to about 5 million, and then grouped and classified as before, we knew the needs of most users in this industry.

When the number of words you can analyze on the search engine reaches 5 million, the data is basically full, and these data can represent the demands of more than half of the people in this industry.. This can be a great application for big data at once.

Later, according to these batches of data, I found that as long as you are in the tourism industry, you will not be able to live well in the strategy industry, because the demand for strategy is behind. As a result, everyone now sees that some APPs that are doing strategy are struggling to be profitable.

Let ’s look at the thesaurus data of the automobile industry. From 2015, “SUV” and “Seven Seats” have been the real hotspots in this industry, but many automobile Internet companies still don’t know this.

Then look at a page on Alibaba: https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/mp3.html

Here are some attributes of MP3. They are classified according to “function”, “screen”, “charging time”, “style” and “color”. The attribute classification here and those items in each category are completely based on search. The search volume of users in the engine is ranked from high to low. As a result, the conversion rate and viscosity are very high, which is 4 times higher than the page made by the product manager at the time.

A lot of details can be shared offline.

The third issue: how to do SEO and PPC well

The most important thing to do well in SEO and PPC is keyword mining. If you don’t do this, you can’t do a good job in search engine traffic. Everyone must understand this scenario: On the search engine, your traffic is spread through the keywords as a carrier, there are not many words to spread your traffic, the total flowDemand, search volume, which are high and low are all told to you. Then spreading content in these channels on Baidu requires only some common sense, as long as you figure out how to put your content in a reasonable way.

The most recent traffic bonus is the Baidu Mini Program, which, like the previous Baijiahao, is ranked first. I personally think this is the last wave of dividends for Baidu.

Baidu has also given a lot of weight to big stations, such as Zhihu, Sohu Media, CSDN (You read that right) , etc. This is also the trend of Google overseas. This is not a eccentric search engine, but after a long evolution, it will gather more good content creators. We can go to the shop and convert users.

Everyone must give up the idea that they must use their own website for traffic. Traffic is definitely more and more focused on the head. The idea of ​​turning your own website into a traffic center is also increasing. The more unrealistic , especially the small station that has no advantage. So you can safely be a content contributor on other platforms, contribute content on these platforms, and then take these pages to any other platform to drain. The approach I’ve always said is to “let content flow through the channel.”

Take “Ejiao” as an example, you can do this:

From the above thesaurus, we can see: “Which gelatin cake is suitable for anyone to eat.” There are more than 20,000 searches per day. I went to Baidu to search for the term. I searched in Hangzhou and found that there was no advertisement for it . (It does not exclude that there are other places or there may be when you look at them.)

At this time, you should go to Zhihu, Baijiahao, Sohu Media, Baidu Know, Baidu Mini Program, etc., and a soft article appears in it, which recommends your product.

And relationship chain. Traffic propagation in many channels is one of these two basic carriers, or it is a variant or mixed.

This is our methodology from the Ali Traffic team, and its derivation is like this:

Behind the flow is the demand for information from all of us, whether you are looking for a joke, watching an article that teaches you to cook, or simply boring to pass the time.

The mode by which humans have spread information so far, either through words or through human relationships.

This was true even in the primitive society when there was no text. For example, a tribe found that its prey was going to hunt, and this information was also transmitted through the language that everyone has formed and the relationship between people.

Suppose we return to the era when there was no Internet more than 20 years ago? The same is true.

I’m a post-80s generation and have gone through an era without the Internet. Let me give an example. At that time, I had a relative working at a shipyard. He heard that there was a technique of underwater welding, but he didn’t know how to achieve it. In the face of such a situation today, you can know by searching. But in the era without the Internet, he also had two ways to solve this problem: one is to go to a library as large as possible to check the materials. In the past, the library had an important function where everyone went to check the materials. Ask his master or other friends to find information through their network. It is very interesting that the Google search engine was born in 1996 when the two founders made electronic libraries for the school at Stanford University.

When texts and videos are transmitted, they must be indexed with keywords. For example, the algorithm of Douyin is to tag each video and everyone. Tags are keywords, and then the keywords and The keywords of the video match, this is a variant.

Let ’s look at the traffic channels with keywords as the carrier.

Search engines, Taobao, and APP stores are keyword-led traffic channels. Needless to say. Even if WeChat is a traffic channel that uses the relationship chain as its carrier, its search traffic on the first screen is very large. The so-called WSO A few success stories. In the search of WeChat applet, if you search for “stock”, there are thousands of applets with the title of the stock, but if you search for “stock price”, only 3 applets have the title of the stock price. The fourth one can also get a lot of users every dayh = “2339”>

For example, Feichao is also the same channel for distribution through keywords. If you think this platform will rise, you must go to build a lot of groups with the hot keywords in this industry as the title, and then the group will burn the traffic. It’s yours. There are also millions of DAUs in Fei Chat.


For platforms such as Douyin, if your videos are tagged with many popular words in the industry, it is not a problem to get a lot of extra traffic, let alone Douyin is searchable. To search for some popular keywords, many of the top video streams have a lot of traffic, but they may not be traffic based on wonderful content, but just tags that hit popular words.

You just need to be firm: As long as humans are still using words to spread information, the “keyword occupation” method will always work.

There are also channels that allow keywords to work even if you spend money on buying traffic. For example, today ’s huge headlines on the headlines are open for keyword targeting.

This article is from WeChat public account: Light Year Labs (ID: gnlabs) , author: Guo-Ping