The High Cost of Free Traffic: Keynote Pubcon by Wil Reynolds

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In this session at Pubcon Las Vegas, keynote speaker Wil Reynolds ( @wilreynolds ), founder of SEER Interactive, explains why it's vital for brands to create "content worth paying for." Follow his slideshow below as you read what Reynolds said in this live blog. The high cost of free traffic from Wil Reynolds The high cost of free traffic For the past six months, Wil has been trying to get SEO results with paid search tactics. In Las Vegas, we probably all stay in a hotel. Search a “Las Vegas hotel” SERP and find the lonely, sidelined organic results. Guess the CTR of spot #1? It's impossible. (See Reynolds' 25+ Reasons Why Predicting CTR From Rankings Is Impossible.) It presents the idea of ​​the usefulness of the decreasing margin with an example. The first hot dog is delicious.

The 50th hot dog, not so much. When you try so hard to achieve a higher ranking and find out that you are getting a CTR of 1.574 and result #4 has a CTR of 1.4… that diminishes the value of the margin. It's a paying world. Many of us will say that Google only cares about paid ads, but remember Facebook isn't much different. Users don't see organic content. Your traffic is not free. The idea that organic is cheap is wrong. Re-do your equations, because we've all been deceived. Start looking at the CTR of the keywords you've ranked well for, and that should help you determine how much time and effort to spend on those things. The question special leads is not whether or not to switch to paid mode. It's: what are you building that is worth paying for for people to see? What have you built that you would pay for people to see?

In a paid world, if you don't write content worth paying for, you just have a slice of organic content that isn't worth seeing. Your content's total audience is greater than your content's search audience. Who here searched for “SEO conference” before coming here to this conference? Maybe 4 out of 2000? What does this mean for the organic-only marketer/SEO? Good luck. It shrinks. This is the biggest Pubcon ever, and the business is growing without anyone trying to come here. This is a reminder that well-executed bio is expensive.