Tackling the GoTo Goliath

To start things off today, we’d like to quickly review the topic of paid-for search engine listings and how they work. GoTo.com is a search engine that when it launched a year and a half ago, it broke boundaries in the world of Internet marketing.

GoTo is a search engine that offers “pay-per-click” keyword rankings that web sites can bid on, giving anyone with enough of a budget the ability to instantly be ranked at the top of the GoTo search engine. GoTo’s business plan has proven to be such a success that listing one’s site in GoTo has become a standard in almost any Internet marketing plan.

In late 2000, GoTo again rocked the online marketing world when it announced it had forged partnerships with some of the most popular search engines on the Internet: AltaVista, Netscape, Lycos, and AOL Search. These search engines are now serving the top 3 or 4 GoTo listings as “Sponsored Listings,” which most often appear as the very first search engine results a viewer sees!

While these GoTo results on multiple search engines are guaranteeing sites with paid listings “across the board exposure,” they are also draining the wallets of smaller web companies who can no longer afford the jump in GoTo click-thrus generated by all these new partnerships. For those out there who do not see the point in inflating our marketing budgets just to help GoTo’s coffers, there are alternatives.

Although some larger search engines like MSN Search tried unsuccessfully to implement the pay-for-placement formula, there have been several smaller search engines that have fared much better. These start-up engines are in similar positions to that which GoTo was in several years ago when it started: neat concept, not a lot of traffic. On the plus side, though, since they do not get the same amount of traffic as GoTo now does, the costs for their top placements are much lower.

Here is a list of some GoTo alternatives:

* Sprinks- Partnered with well- trafficked About.com, Sprinks serves sponsored links for relevant guide sites and searches.

* FindWhat.com- Well-marketed search engine and fairly popular.

* Ah-ha.com- Serves site logos along with search listings.

* SearchHound- Great site with Webmaster tools.

* Kanoodle- Similar to GoTo and FindWhat.

* Search123- Newest pay-per-listing engine.

The strategy behind bidding for top placement on these engines instead of GoTo is quite simple: you can literally list your site at the top of each of these search engines for pennies compared to what you would pay per click on GoTo. For example, let’s say you have a football site and you want to get it out there for everyone to see during Superbowl Week. You can either pay $1.41 per click for the #2 placement for the term “super bowl” on GoTo or pay $0.20 on Findwhat, $.10 on Kanoodle, 4 cents on Search123, or one penny on Sprinks!! Hey, at that rate, you can bid on ALL these alternative search engines simultaneously!

Other interesting terms to compare:

“internet marketing”: $4.00 for top bid on GoTo; $0.73 on FindWhat.
“search engine optimization”: $5.41 for top bid on GoTo; $0.40 on FindWhat.

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