REVIEW: 7Search.com Pay per click search engine

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Written by Tom from Tom's Newbie Booster

Search URL: http://www.7search.com/
Webmaster URL: http://www.payperranking.com/

I'm not sure I'm even qualified to write a review on 7search because I'm relatively new to this pay per click search engine. Last night was my first shot at playing around with this baby. I'll post more on it when I have some results, but these are my early impressions of the set up process, and how it looks in general.

What is 7Search?

7Search is a pay per click search engine in the style of Overture. In a nutshell, you create an account, give your credit card details and then 'bid' on how much you would like to pay for every surfer it sends to one of your pages. Paying more money for a 'click' will result in a better ranking for your page when someone searches on the phrase you've paid for.

The set up...

What is it with these pay per click search engines? It took me quite a bit of time hunting around the http://www.payperranking.com/ website before I found the link for "registration". This site could take a leaf out of the 'perfect Paysite tour' guide, and make it's 'join' links a lot more accessible.

Another thing that I found irritating, to begin with, was the simply MAMMOTH page of text that greets potential advertisers. There's around 2000 words to wade through before you can sign-up, and most of it was just not necessary.

Having braved this initial onslaught of sales jargon and mind-numbing fluff, I made it to the first page of the sign-up process. I had created a special mini-site to handle the traffic, and to test the system, and I began to fill out the required details.

As a general comment on 7search's service, it's not too friendly to newcomers. There's a lot of reading to do at just about every stage, and most of it serves only to make things more complicated.

Playing the bidding game...

The GOOD news about 7search is that the price per clicks are a lot lower than Google's adwords select (http://www.tomsnewbiebooster.com/review-google-ad-words-select.html), or Overture's system. You can pay as little as 1 cent for a phrase and, as long as no-one else is paying to be listed under that phrase, you could even nail the top spot for it at that price. I found that I was able to buy a number of good phrases (which I dug out with the help of Overture's tool - http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) - and get a top 5 position for 4 - 5 cents.

As with Overture, you can easily see how much people are paying for phrases because price is displayed next to their ranking listing. 7search also has a built-in feature, when you're buying phrases, which will tell you how much you'll need to pay to get the number 1 position. (This is to tempt you into spending just a few cents more...)

Adding keyphrases, and editing your URL or description is relatively straight forward. You click a button and then input multiple keyphrases. I found that it was pretty straight forward to cut and paste those suckers from Overture directly into the 'new keywords' box. Editing keywords is very simple and you can edit them all on one screen and save changes to them all with ONE click.

But wait... it's not ALL good news.

Indeed it's not - 7Search has it's share of problems too. Not least the apparent lack of a good keyword mining tool. You might think that you can just go and use Overture's suggestion tool to find your phrases, and you'd be partially correct. The main problem with dong that is that every PPC search engine I've tried seems to have slightly different results. One phrase might be highly searched for on Google, but won't get you much traffic on 7search (I'm talking about more obscure ones here). I found that I was finding good keyphrases at Overture's suggestion tool BUT, when I came to bid on them in 7search, they were predicted to get zero traffic per month. It would have been helpful to have a decent tool which would done a better job at finding phrases that were relevant, and which WOULD get traffic. Maybe I've missed it...

And then there's the traffic...

7Search isn't in the same league as Google when it comes to traffic, and I'm guessing that it doesn't have the same as Overture either. I'm not even sure which partners this engine has, although I did read that 35% of search engines out there do use 7search. How many of those engines will provide adult searches remains to be seen. But from the click estimates on various phrases out there, it doesn't look too good as far as 7search's traffic goes. If you bid on a set of highly focused, obscure phrases, you could find yourself with zero traffic each day.

To wrap up...

As with all the PPC engines I've tried so far, it's been a mix of frustration, joy, and some downsides too. 7search has a lot to offer and DOES have some good features (like the way you're added INSTANTLY - unlike Overture's 3-5 days to find out your phrases were not acceptable !) And, as I mentioned, it's early days yet. The real results will be in the numbers. I'll keep you posted on my progress.

Ease of use: 7 / 10
Reporting: 6 / 10
Adult webmaster friendly: 10 / 10
Friendly rules / use no content sites: 10 / 10
OVERALL: 8

TOM ^"^

ICQ 12616560
Email tom@tomsnewbiebooster.com

ICQ 12616560
Email tom@tomsnewbiebooster.com