Dental Marketing Tactics
Attracting Visitors to your Web Site for Pennies a Click
By Fernando Diaz-Lundstedt


If you want to get more bang for your Web marketing buck, here's a search engine you must know about: GoTo.com.

Specifically designed for companies with small marketing budgets, GoTo.com allows you to reach targeted audiences in clearly-defined geographic markets. More important, it does so in a very cost-effective manner.

How does it work? By allowing you to select your own search terms and determine what to pay on a per-click basis for each term. The higher you "bid," the higher in the search results your site appears. The net result is that you get targeted advertising at a price you can afford.

For example, suppose you want to know how many people in the Atlanta market searched for dentists using terms like "Atlanta dentist," "Dentist Atlanta" or "Dentist in Atlanta." GoTo.com will not only tell you how many people searched the site using those terms, it will also indicate how much it would cost to get a #1 ranking with each of those search criteria.

In a few easy steps, you can determine which criteria work best in your market and how much you need to pay in order to go to the head of the class. Depending on your market and the number of searches conducted each month, you can often achieve the #1 ranking for mere pennies per click.

However, the good news doesn't stop there. Once you attain a top position on GoTo.com searches, you automatically get a top listing with "meta-search" engines like metacrawler.com and mamma.com. (A meta-search tool scans search engines like AltaVista, Direct hit, AOLsearch, Hotbot, etc. and provides a condensed listing of all the results.) Better still, the listings on meta-search engines don't cost you a penny more.

I can tell you from personal experience how well the GoTo.com/meta-search engine technique worked for one of my clients. In the first three weeks after we put up his Web site, we received nearly 400 unique visits. Forty-five percent of our visitors heard about the web site through word of mouth. However, six percent came from GoTo.com and the remaining 49 percent came from meta-search engines like mamma.com and metacrawler.com. The total cost to attract more these 200+ visitors to his web site? Less than $15.

You can take out banner ads on Yahoo or hire a specialized consultant to get you near the top of Altavista, but it will cost you an arm and a leg to do so. My recommendation is to save yourself a lot of money (and aggravation) and check out GoTo.com.

Currently, as an example, the cost at GoTo.com for a #1 position as Atlanta dentist is a mere four cents per click. That means you can attract 625 visitors to your site for the initial $25 dollars it takes to open the account. And you get the collateral effect with the other search engines for free.

Obviously, the per click costs will vary from city to city. But you still end up with effective, highly targeted marketing for far less than money than you would spend with the major search engines. And (one more time so you don't forget) you end up on the meta-search engines for free.

With more and more people turning to the time-saving meta-search engines, GoTo.com offers a Web marketing tool that you can't afford to pass up.

Through this website and our newsletters I will keep you posted in regard to the best tools that you can use to face the competition: news, reports and special tools for the dental marketing of your practice.