Anyone go to a Google Adwords Seminar for Success?

[grnidone]

I'd like opinions from others on what they thought of the Google Adwords Seminars. Honestly, I am questioning all that I learned there.

A couple weeks ago, I attended a Google Adwords Seminar for Success here in Dallas given by Stasia Holdren of Sitening.com.

I attended the afternoon class, called "Advanced Optimization Techniques" showed step by step ways to increase conversions, traffic and touched a bit on the quality score. Not a whole lot of new information for me, but still good for someone who was a beginner.

Then, google analytics. It was during the analytics section of the class that Holdren said something that turned me off to the entire class.

As she was looking through google analytics, she pulled up her site, sitening.com as an example. As she pulled up the sources of traffic, she said that her site was very atypical because 92% of the site referrals came from search.

She commented that there was a person on the team that had a "little hobby" of trying to get their site ranked as high as possible in organic search, and that he spent much of his time after work and "through the night" doing this.

She laughed like it was a joke and then went on to say "Basically by the time you spend all the time optimizing your site for organic search, you may as well just pay for the traffic because it is going to cost the same."

I was stunned.

Literally my mouth was agape, and I couldn't say anything. In fact, this comment made me question that she knew anything about online marketing at all. If she doesn't understand the value of optimizing your site for organic search, how can she be considered an 'expert' in online marketing?

I am curious, though, to see what others have to say about their experience with the Google Adwords Seminars.

[briggidere]

i've been to a couple at the london ses conferences and learnt nothing new to be honest. they are (even the advanced) for fairly basic users of the program in my opinion.

But, it does prove to yourself that you know more than you think you know and in many cases, more knowledgable than the "experts"

[abbottsys]

Originally Posted by grnidone

...I was stunned....

Don't be shocked.

Perhaps she didn't handle this correctly, but it sounds like she wanted to make the important point that SEO is not free. External SEO vendors can be very expensive (depending on the size and scope of your website and number of keywords), and if you do it with internal staff you should still figure in staff costs.

So, we all know SEM (PPC) costs money, and many folks still tend to think of the organics as "free", but when you figure in real SEO costs they are not. Sounds like she was trying to make this point. She might not have done it too well, but it's a valid point.

[AussieWebmaster]

She is in good company.... Dave Pasternak of Did-It is belittling SEO lately too... though in his case I think it is all about link baiting.