Google Results Have Stopped Sending Customers

“with 14 views the numbers are too small to mean much yet, so dont read too much into the 56%. normal ctr is more like 2-10%, it's usually that high early because the first impressions come from people who already know you or found you directly. shorts and long videos get tested separately so dont compare them. on long form id watch average view duration more than ctr, if people stay that's what gets it pushed to more people. honestly at 1 video the best thing is just making the next few.”

“We're a small digital marketing agency, but we don't sell the typical full-service PPC or SEO retainers that agencies pitch to business owners. We sell a niche, high-effort service that's bought by specialists inside a marketing team, not by the owner or CEO, so the usual "pitch the decision maker" playbook doesn't apply. Average deal is $3-5K a year, some go up to $10K, and we have an $890 entry offer. Referrals, networking and very targeted LinkedIn outreach work, but”

“Hi everyone, learning SEO and trying to understand how to identify quality guest posting opportunities without a paid budget. Apart from searching for “Write for Us” pages, what strategies do you use to find websites that accept original guest contributions for free? How do you evaluate whether a website is worth pursuing based on niche relevance, organic traffic, content quality, and its backlink profile rather than relying only on DA or DR? I'd appreciate practical advice based on your exp”

“Start smaller than you think. Pick 10 to 20 searches where someone is close to buying what you make, check who ranks for them, and write one page per search that answers it better. Long tail first, a new site won't rank for the head term for a long time. Then the boring basics: Search Console set up today, sitemap submitted, every page with its own title and description, pages linking to each other. Links matter more than most people want to hear. What actually moves things for me is getting”

“this is exactly it. word of mouth through other shows beats any paid ad imo [re: I spent $200 US on ads and these are the results (Not worth it)]”

“Yep same. I think you’ve laid it out nicely 👍🏽 [re: I spent $200 US on ads and these are the results (Not worth it)]”

“mmmm yeah I agree- that's worked best for me so far! I haven't heard of ParseStream but will look at it [re: I spent $200 US on ads and these are the results (Not worth it)]”

“Your ad results are super common, especially with broad impressions but low actual engagement or conversions. Focusing on organic discussions where people are already interested in your niche often works better. Tools like ParseStream make it easy to spot those real time conversations across platforms so you can join in and share your podcast without relying just on paid ads. [re: I spent $200 US on ads and these are the results (Not worth it)]”

“Appreciate the actual license numbers alongside the ranking. Can you tell how many of the 15 new purchases came through Product Hunt, versus traffic you were already getting? That would make the launch much easier to judge. [re: Launched my Mac app on Product Hunt as a solo dev: #22 of the day, and licenses went from 39 to 54]”

“I used to think scaling meant finding the magic audience or the perfect budget trick. It does not. The biggest wins came from fixing the funnel before spending more. The product page has to load fast, look clean and answer trust questions right away, so I put the COA and third party testing proof right under the add to cart button. Add a clear shipping threshold, a simple bundle and a short FAQ that handles the usual doubts, and the same traffic suddenly converts better. On the creative side, ug”

“Hi, I had a look. And can only give a personal opinion since I'm not an expert, though trying to do my own digital marketing. I had no issues understanding the proposal it seemed quite clear to me. The Page hero may not have convinced me to scroll down though. Though I tend to overload mine... And it depends where the people opening the page are coming from/ what their expectations are. I usually like to see a pricing tab, though I had no issue finding the price. DOn't know if its there”

“Congrats! A stranger paying after trying it is a much stronger signal than friends saying it looks good. I’m at the stage right before my first customers, so seeing this is motivating. Did you reach out to him afterwards to ask what worked for him? [re: I just got my first paying customer for my SaaS!]”

“OP, which really kicked things in motion..? Marketing or SEO..or was it your network helping out. Just curious still trying to get wind under wings. [re: Business ownership isn't for those who can't handle living on the edge]”

“pricing is a rounding error compared to the no-traffic problem. you need people to see it, and reddit's full of your exact audience if you catch the right threads. something like replyhey scans and scores relevant subreddits and drafts replies so you don't come off as the spammy guy. worth a peek. [re: Priced my learning product at $14.99/mo with exactly 1 paying user. Roast the pricing]”

“Your provider pages are leaking. Nearly all the views are dying before the outbound click. Fix the CTA and placement first. If you scale traffic now you'll amplify a funnel where searches and views look healthy but actual provider contact stays flat. Outbound clicks or inquiries are the activation metric, not logged views. [re: My local directory finally has users. Now I’m trying not to ruin it by building too much.]”

“I paused Meta when SEO leads converted better, then tracked which pages actually closed customers. [re: Founders, this is how I am spending in marketing. Am I burning money? i will not promote]”

“I like that you're sharing actual numbers, especially the revenue. We see plenty of impressive traffic figures online, but very little about what happens afterward. One thing I'd be curious about is how many of those 188K views translated into app downloads and eventually paying customers. Have you been able to track that? It would be interesting to know whether that one Reddit discussion generated most of your customers or whether it simply helped build awareness over time. [re: 188K Re”

“I'd watch those 17 outbound clicks harder than the 318 searches. I ran a tiny listing site once and the search numbers looked healthy while the click-through told me the layout was confusing. Following the real searches is already the right move honestly. [re: My local directory finally has users. Now I’m trying not to ruin it by building too much.]”

318 searches and 17 outbound clicks is a real signal. And the searches showing you the gaps is the best part, id keep that loop no matter what I'd go mostly distribution…

“We started an online business april 2024 in Bulgaria. The niche is children book's for brain activities. Whole the year we sold only in Bulgaria and we sold above 10.000 books the same year with CPA 3$-4$ and AOV 20$ with very good profit. In 2025 we opened 3 new markets - Romania, Hungary and Poland. Untill april-may before Andromeda update, the CPA was about 4$-6$ in all the countries, and we had more than 100 orders per day with ROAS 3. Autumn 2025 we increased our budgets and we had 200-”

“one.mojitiles.com shows exactly one post. Whoever paid last is on top, with a timer showing how long they've held it. When someone else pays, they take the spot and the old post moves to a list below with its time. 144 characters, emojis and links allowed, self promo is fine. $15 a post. Kind of like the Million Dollar Homepage, except you own the whole page until someone kicks you off. Could be a week, could be 30 seconds. Built with Laravel + Stripe Checkout. Right now the only post is min”

“The interesting part is how much of the boring marketing work you’ve systemized instead of trying to automate the whole thing. I’d still be careful about judging it off views though. If you can track which creators/accounts actually lead to installs and revenue, that seems way more useful than just scaling whatever gets the most reach. [re: just got 3k first week on my 11th app! and the marketing is super automated.]”

“I was under the impression that optimizing your site for visibility in the SERPs doesn’t make sense anymore. I saw a GSC screenshot of basically 3x growth in organic vis in 3 months with over 2M impressions and 2.2% CTR. Is there a world where, if that screenshot is real, that website is not a growing brand and the increase in vis and clicks came from non brand queries? If so, what am I missing and can anyone list websites that have seen growth in organic traffic that isn’t linked to just an inc”

“Monthly ad spend is $3k I've analyzed the numbers from the past 3 years, and all in all I spent like $75k on PPC, and made it all back in profit, maybe even cleared $85k profit including repeat orders. question: is it worth it for me to engage with PPC again if this will continue being the story? (I get cc points, too, so that's like $1500 in non-taxable points!!) Or am I better off saving up my money for other stuff, like hiring salespeople? submitted by /u/Snowboardsurfer91”

“Two weeks in with one job is a normal start, so I would not read too much into it yet. The free channel that usually pays off first for hardscape work is the Google Business Profile, because people search for things like patio installers or concrete contractors near them. Set the primary category to the closest match for the work you want most, list each specific service, set the service area to the towns you actually want to drive to, and add photos of every finished job with a short note about”

“Recently I was looking around on TrustMRR . I follow the creator Marc Lou so naturally I found out about the website and wanted to know what it is for myself. I checked out the leaderboard and clicked my way through a few SaaS's when I noticed something. There were highlight banners of a handful of SaaS's on the left and right side of the website. On the bottom right was one empty slot with a subtle "Advertise 2/20 spots left". This is when I understood that he sells ad slots o”

“So in the starting We got very good traction we created lot of content but after a while I am seeing that for one keyword we are getting impressions on 5 6 pages and one page is getting impression for different type of keywords also maybe I feel like that my keyword analysis was not good actually we just identified common or topics on which we should write content and we start it writing them but now I feel like the content is jumbled up every blog is getting impressions for multiple keyword. I”

“Even though the app is X focused, it's probably lowest selling channel, what brings customers is SEO and AEO today. :) [re: My side project is making more than my 9-5]”

“in a breakdown i recorded in june, i looked at customers whose first recorded landing page was our /autoblog page. 44 had paid. the payment summary showed roughly $24k collected after refunds, including repeat subscription payments. that was accumulated revenue, not MRR or profit. the useful part was joining the landing-page data to payments. here's how i'd repeat the check: save the first landing URL against the visitor, then carry it across when they sign up. don't overwrite it eve”

“Not a trainer but I do marketing for local businesses. For something like dog training it's almost always google business profile first, people literally search dog trainer near me. Get reviews, post photos regularly. After that short before/after videos on IG or TikTok do really well, and teaming up with local vets, groomers and pet stores for referrals is underrated [re: As dog trainers, which platform generated more leads?]”

“Over the past year, I've been helping out a friend with their shopify site b/c they've been down quite a bit year over year. So much so, they were not paying themselves this year until things got better. I reluctantly jumped on board to help while doing a bunch of other projects, but recently was able to hammer away at their SEO. I wanted to do more earlier this year, but b/c of the other projects, I didn't really do as much. However, after finally optimizing product & collection”

“the seo line is the only one on that list that keeps working after you stop paying. cancel the meta ads and the traffic dies that day. i built blawgy on the content side so discount that, but the real question isnt whether 544 is a lot, its whether any single line is funded enough to learn anything from. at 150 max, none of them are. id drop the networking subs and put that money behind one channel for 90 days [re: Founders, this is how I am spending in marketing. Am I burning money? i will not”

“$150/month on Meta is below the level where the algorithm even bothers with you, you'll just pay to be ignored. Apollo at $65 being your second biggest line item is the actual tell, that's a prospecting tool, not marketing. [re: Founders, this is how I am spending in marketing. Am I burning money? i will not promote]”

“$150/month on Meta is below the level where the algorithm even bothers with you, you'll just pay to be ignored. Apollo at $65 being your second biggest line item is the actual tell, that's a prospecting tool, not marketing. [re: Founders, this is how I am spending in marketing. Am I burning money? i will not promote]”

“Ok thank you that’s actually very helpful advice. [re: What’s Wrong With My Landing Page?]”

“But isn't SEO a long term strategy? Waiting for users to sign up and then converting them to paid users is a long process. I dont think SEO can justify in short term [re: Founders, this is how I am spending in marketing. Am I burning money? i will not promote]”

“If SEO is your only channel generating results, I'd use it as the foundation of your strategy rather than just increasing the budget blindly. Double down on the keywords and pages that convert, then use the data to identify where other channels can support the funnel. For example, retarget organic visitors through Meta Ads and use social content to build trust. I'd measure each channel by CAC and paying-customer conversions, not just traffic. [re: Founders, this is how I am spending in m”

submitted by /u/galratner [link] [comments]

“You’re missing the most important part. What are the metrics for being pushed to your site? You’re paying marketing to drive traffic, how is the traffic after you started marketing that way? Why are Claude, LinkedIn premium and Reddit Pro under marketing, those are not marketing spends. My base guess, you’re not getting much traffic and you haven’t found your niche. Pro-tip the question is not what you spend but who you are trying to pull in, what is the demo, but also how do you curate towards”

“if nobody's using it and it's not converting even with a free tier, you already have your answer the competitor thing is a trap, different audiences, different context. kill it and move that energy somewhere else [re: When do you decide to kill a feature?]”

“honestly the thing I'd add to #5: open Search Console (the free google one) and read the actual queries, not the traffic number. if it's nearly all your business name, you're only getting found by people who already knew you existed. that's a different problem than ranking. and the bit nobody checks... what the pages are actually called. so many small biz sites have one Services page covering six jobs people search for separately. splitting that out moved more for me than any spe”

“no, it's spam. ads are very, very different. [re: One Reddit post did more for my app than the 10 months before it]”

“Just wondering about this. Came across a thread conversation about it, many said Towing, or Garbage collecting but I was qondering if there's an online equivalent? submitted by /u/RiverDeSaintLubov [link] [comments]”

“I've spent months on projects nobody cared about. Then I built something I'm not particularly proud of. 993 visitors. 3.9K pageviews. In one day. Still $0 revenue, so definitely not claiming PMF. But it reminded me of something: Build something people want, not something you think is impressive. submitted by /u/Apart-Medium6539 [link] [comments]”

“I ran ads back in 2023 but pretty much "broke even" so I stopped. At this point my website it stronger, and while I relied mostly on organic traffic from Google this entire time, it's been a downward slide and the seo traffic has significantly slowed. I'm thinking whether its worth exploring Google Ads again. I don't really have a lot of money to lose. What would you set as the minimum spend to experiment with to see if it's working? submitted by /u/Long-Bra”

“so many folks jump straight to paid ads and burn cash before they even know what message sticks. start with manual outreach in places where your users actually hang out. subreddits, niche forums, discord servers. not pitching right away, just being helpful and building some trust. takes longer but the feedback loop is tighter and you'll learn way more about what your customers care about than any analytics dashboard will tell you [re: What's really working for outreach/sales?]”

“Build organic traction first. Find the content that naturally performs. Then put paid spend behind the winners instead of guessing what might work. That’s exactly what I’m building MITPO.io to help with [re: 6 months in, $0 revenue. What marketing actually worked for you?]”

“Awesome. [re: If you dont have Distribution, Invest in SEO and AEO. 3 month old tool hitting 500+ visitors from google alone, Ask me Anything]”

“How do you justify the returns to advertisers as for a new platform you don't have past data mostly it would be tech dev tools i guess [re: I worked hard for this, so I'm posting it here T_T (Motivation, zero Promotion)]”

“Google sells it as a conversion channel. In my D2C accounts it’s a strong assist channel and a mediocre direct one. The frustrated accounts are judging it on last-click. What’s worked: warm audiences first, video and image in separate campaigns, product feed attached for shoppable formats, and measuring on blended MER and branded search lift rather than in-platform ROAS. Questions: Which placements actually convert for you: YouTube in-feed, Shorts, Discover, or Gmail? How are you measuring it be”

“Its an app directory (link in my profile). I get an average of 3-4 visits per day. Here's what im thinking: Why I should not: because I don't have much traffic yet. Also, if no one sponsors the placement, the visitor will think the directory is dead. Why should I : Because if a potential vendor had to put his app in the sponsored listing, then he won't come to know I am unable to find a concrete solution from these options. But what i think is i should add an advertise option in my n”

“This is so true [re: If you dont have Distribution, Invest in SEO and AEO. 3 month old tool hitting 500+ visitors from google alone, Ask me Anything]”

submitted by /u/intelligentAct_2928 [link] [comments]

“i've been into the Online world for 3 years now and Marketing is the hardest part when it comes to selling your product, i have more than 3k followers on X (not promoting myself) but only a few of them signup for anything i launch (i have 4 saas so far) but now since i've been focusing a lot on SEO and AEO of my saas, i have started seeing results like this. AMA submitted by /u/Emotional_Driver_756 [link] [comments]”

“I have two dotcom domains similar to something like musictools-com or physicswiki-com and I would gladly try to build something nice there (I just like making websites as hobby). The thing is, if the existence of google ai summary means that those websites won't even earn enough to cover yearly domain cost then my motivation will likely fade out sooner or later. submitted by /u/Deep-Philosophy-807 [link] [comments]”

“I am serving Google Ads for this landing page https://aigeoreport.com/lp . I am getting clicks, but the bounce rate is 100%, and I think the reason is that Google is serving my Ad for very broad searches; that is probably the reason of a 100% bounce rate because people are not getting what they thought would get there; I already have a very long list of negative keywords. submitted by /u/No-Mongoose-6332 [link] [comments]”

submitted by /u/Cute_Plastic_6287 [link] [comments]

“I generally don't rely on Meta or Google’s dashboard to tell you whether the ads are paying back. They’re both pretty happy to take credit for the same customer, you know? Companies will do anything to show hat they're giving you the most ROI. What really helps is pulling the subscription revenue from Stripe and the app stores, then matching it back to acquisition channels using UTMs or install attribution wherever possible. The important bit is looking at cohorts. So if you spent $2k on”

“I’d recommend looking into Skip the Noise Media. They’re worth checking out if you need help with paid ads, SEO, and your overall marketing strategy. I’d suggest discussing your specific DTC goals with them to see if they’re a good fit. [re: Recommendations for a marketing agency that specializes in DTC products?]”