This is the third part of our three-part local domination symphony. You pay to be on Google or Yahoo. In other words, you pay to play. Let’s look at sponsored links.
They are usually on the right side of the page and sometimes going across the top of the page.
Again, these are not organic or free results. These are the paid results. I have to tell you that the statistics show that searchers are three times more likely to click on the organic results over the sponsored results, but that being said, paid search is still a way to get on that front page. Organic search takes times and energy, while pay-per-click and other sponsored links are quick. But, you just have to pay the price.
How do you set up pay-per-click?
You’ll need to open up a Google or Yahoo account. After that you’ll need to activate the adwords part of it, and fund it. You fund it with a credit card. Then you can start creating ads and designating your daily budget. You decide how much you want to spend on a daily basis. Your ads were assigned a quality score that will determine how much you are going to need to pay to be on that first page. When searchers click on your ad, you pay Google. The clicks can cost you anywhere from $0.05 to $10 depending on what the keyword phrase is you are optimizing for. If you are optimizing for something like “chiropractor in Chicago,” you’ll pay about $1 per click. If you are optimizing for “back pain relief,” you’ll be paying about $6 per click. However, if you are optimizing for “arthritis relief” (sometimes you can optimize for that, but not always), you’ll pay up to $7 or $8 per click for that. So, the cost depends on how frequently the keyword is searched and how good your quality scores are.
Let’s look at pay-per-click a little closer. Back to the first page of Google and our Miami chiropractor. Notice the sponsored links. If you were to click on the link, you would be taken to the doctor’s web page. And every time someone clicks, the doctor is going to get charged. The idea is that by drawing someone to your website, if you have a good website, that person is going to say, “Hey, I want to go to see that doctor!”
Again, if you don’t know anything about how to set up this type of thing, we have a free ten-part course,The Ten Essentials of chiropractic internet marketing. Just go to http://www.chiropracticmarketingtoday.com and download it. It walks you through how to set up your first campaign in adwords. Take advantage of this free course, if you haven’t ever done this before, before you set up a pay-per-click campaign and start spending your money.
Let’s recap: You’ve read about Google maps (the 7-pack), organic search (the free, but time consuming results), on-page factors (the things you can do on your website), off-page factors (the things you can do for your website to give it authority), the links coming into your site, and the age of your website. And, finally we’ve learned about paying to get on the front page through adwords and pay-per-click.
Next Steps: You need to start cultivating your website, developing your property so that it becomes more and more relevant. If you act soon, you are going to be able to rise above those chiropractors that are currently on the front page because most of them don’t know why they are there.
You need to create and continue to create content (quality content), and you need to optimize that content with keywords. Optimizing the content means that you need to make it relevant. You need to have the right chiropractic keywords, you need to have the pertinent topics, and you need to optimize your entire website with the on-page factors you’ve just read about. Then you’ll need to get those backlinks (the more the better).
In future articles and posts I will be going into great detail on exactly how to accomplish these steps and dominate the internet in your town.