Mememax,  thank you.  I did not know this.

Have you tried the Custom 404 Widget?

People who run PPC campaigns should be focused on the average cost for a conversion and the average profit on a sale.  These can vary wildly as traffic blasts arrive from various sources that might have purchase intent or not.  As soon as the eye is removed from the cost of what you are doing and the profit that it is producing, then a vendors shirt can be lost without knowing it.

I do assessments of existing articles by looking at their traffic.  If they are pulling in very little traffic I look at their optimization and see if I can tweak them towards better keywords.   I also look at traffic growth over time.  For my sites a new article might not start drawing representative traffic until it has been on the site for at least a year.

Adding to Kristina's comment.   If you have an informational page you can often rank in the local SERPs with no mention of any geographic location.   I have lots of informational pages about products and services.  Many of them rank on the first page of Google across the United States and many countries.

To do this you must write kickass content for noobs on the topic of "psychic readings".  I am talking about several articles that are the best for their topic that exist on the web, better than anyone anywhere.  If you are willing to do that, and can do that ("can do it" and "willing to do it" are very different things), it is possible to get it on the first page of Google.  If you happen to also offer that product or service, you can run house ads on that page that direct visitors to your sales pages.

Often, the competition is not as steep as you expect.  People who sell stuff are so focused on promoting sales pages that they totally ignore writing content that is so basic that a noob would want to read it and be able to understand it.   They are focused on sell sell sell.  And, Google, like a good search engine, will often mix informative content onto a page full of sales, just so people who are simply curious can learn about that topic.

So, I might write a dozen or two articles like these and post them on my site....

What to expect from you first psychic reading.....

Are psychic readings bogus?....

How can a psychic give accurate readings?...

How to know if my psychic is giving me a good reading?  ....

Then, after I have a great library of articles about psychic readings, I would make a category page that contains "the first article that anyone consulting a psychic should read".  That article will occupy the left column of that page.  The right column of that page would link out to all of the general "psychic readings" articles that I have along with some of the best that are out on the web - even if they are on my competitors websites.

No guarantees on this, but if you write all of these articles and do a fantastic job they should pull in some visitors and give you one of the most awesome libraries on the web.  I have ranked for some really difficult queries using this approach.  It takes a lot of work, you got to be patent before you see results, but if you can bust into the national or English language or global search results the traffic can be awesome.

Good luck if you try this.

we don't do the hard sell

If I read that on your website, I would be a lot more likely to call.  This is why I would be an email person.  I want to avoid this.

Unless we know the customer's financial history we can't offer fair and reasonable advice

If you tell me this before you start asking I am will be more comfortable about providing it.  You probably do this now.

I bet all of my money on visitor engagement years ago.  I don't think anybody believed me then, lots don't believe me now.   I have not done any real site promotion for a long time.

Throwing Out the Book on SEO!

I agree, especially with financial products.   I worry that they are going to want lots of personal information from me when I am only calling to ask a few questions.  Then they hit the hard sell.

So, if you can convey that you are not hard sell people and that you only ask personal information when the person is ready to give it then I might see that as a refreshing change and take a chance calling.

Yes, the links should come from your own website.

If you have a powerful site, creating sitewide links to several logical category pages within your product pages can be adequate.

If your site is new or not very strong yet then it may be best to grow the number of product pages in steps as your site is able to get them in the index and hold them in the index.  A weak site will probably not be able to get 5,000,000 pages indexed.  If your site is not powerful, attempting to do it usually results in a ranking decline on the original part of the site.

Link deep into the site at many different internal hubs from high PR pages.  That forces spiders into the depths of the site and forces them to chew their way out through unindexed pages.  These links must remain in place permanently if you want the site to stay in the index, because if Google goes too long without spidering a page it will forget about it.

A mistake that people often make is to try to place five million pages on a PR3 website.  That will not work.  Not enough spiders coming in.  For a site like you are talking about you might need many dozen healthy PR6 links or hundreds of PR5 links and quite a bit of prayer.   For a site as deep as yours you might need to link to hubs at multiple depths because Google does budget the amount of crawl that they will perform.  The spiders will die down there.

I agree. If you still have two weeks of work with them, they can use that to take the links down.

These are good rules.  I think that the site owner also needs to get some basic understanding of SEO to evaluate proposals of work that will be done.  In addition, the site owner should get advice about proposals from third parties if he/she does not fully understand the work being done or what search engines expect.  Even when I work on my own sites, I often get paid consultations from people who have more experience, just asking them... "Do you think that this will work?  Is there a better way?"

I get so many companies contact me but so nervous as to who is reputable.

Most of the work on my websites is done by me or a long time employee.  However, most months I receive SEO, programming, design, usability consultations or contract work from an outside person or company.  For the last ten years, all of this work has been done by people I have gotten to know by reading the free advice that they give in forums like Moz Q&A.  In all of that time I have not been disappointed because I have been able to observe their responses on a wide variety of questions.

I would be very hesitant to hire a person or company who contacts me directly.  I get lots of these messages and phone calls for each of my sites and most of them are not offering a service that I would use.

So, if I had a new site for which I needed help, I would post lots of questions here.  See who responds, and the quality of their responses.  I would also read lots of responses from people who answer the questions of others.  Then after I see someone who offers good advice on the topics where I need help, I would send them a message asking if they are available.

I am not posting this because I am looking for work.  I only work on my own websites.  I am just saying how I find the people who do this work for me.  There are a lot of people who post on Moz Q&A who I have gotten to know by reading their posts and who I would trust to work on my websites.

At any given time Google has lots of different indexes.   They are always testing different algos and using different vintages of data.  All of this happens on thousands of severs at multiple data centers worldwide.   So, if your pages are relatively new then they might be in and out of the the search results that you see depending upon which of the many servers responds to your query.  The newer the pages, the more volatile they might be.  The weaker your website, the longer it will take them to stabilize in the search results.

That is a partial answer to your question.   (Read the book "In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives" by Steven Levy.  Very interesting, helps you be a better SEO because you will understand how they think and work a little better.)

I made a lot of car accident lawyer city pages.  They probably weren't as unique as they should have been.

If you did this Google will probably index them and start displaying all of them.  Then, if Google decides that some of these pages are not as unique as they would like, some of them will be filtered from the search results.  To find out of this is happening go to the very end of the search results and on the last page you might see something like.....

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 10 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

If your page can be found in the "repeat the search.... " then you will know that Google thinks that the page is too similar to other pages on the web (on your site or on other sites) and they have filtered your page from the search results.

If you have lots of these pages then google might think that you have a low quality website and their Panda algo will get you.  That will demote the rankings of almost all of your pages for almost all of their relevant queries and your traffic will drop suddenly.

If you really make them mad with this stuff they might consider your site to be even lower  than low quality - meaning spam - and deindex lots of your pages or your entire site.

So, that is the stuff that can happen.  Don't publish a lot of cookie cutter pages or just change place names and insert synonyms.  Google has been slapping people for that stuff for at least ten years.

Also see here and here for good responses to similar questions asked by you and answered by Patrick Delehanty.