I wanted to share with a case study that I have been involved in with a client recently. The client has an offline business and works mainly with offline customers. Like many offline customers he also wants to bring lots of internet traffic his way!
He was already paying for Adwords and paying $0.20 per click. His business was seasonal so he was only going to get searches between the summer May – October season. The keywords would be much targeted so his Adwords would convert like crazy.
However he wanted SEO so we set to work on it for him. He then said his strategy was to pay for high quality back links and rent them. Totally against Google rules but he felt this was his best chance of top of the Google rankings so we left him to it…..
Six months later and he had paid for lots of links and was now at the top of the rankings. He was first position on Google for all 10 keywords he wanted to target.
He needed 100 page rank of 7 links for this and it was costing him $2000 a month in rental costs for links on related websites.
The search volume then meant for the time of the year when he had customers searching he was going to generate 300 visitors a day for the season.
Therefore he was paying $2000 a month all year around for these positions costing him $24000 a year.
If he was using Adwords and he was getting 300 visitors a day from it then it would be costing him $1800 a month and $10,800 per year. After all, he was seasonal and didn’t need to pay for any in the six month off season time.
He would actually be $13,200 per year better off and what would happen if Google got wind of what he was doing and just bashed him to the bottom of Google?
At least with Adwords he would be guaranteed the traffic.
My own personal opinion though, is that Google will catch you eventually and you are much better off just doing natural SEO and you can do it at a much cheaper price then renting backlinks.
