I search the internet occasionally for interesting news about medical transcription and it seems all I find are these crappy sites. I ran into one this morning that really got me going, so I thought I’d share. Have you ever wondered why there are so many crappy articles and web sites devoted to medical transcription careers – usually promoting some of the more questionable schools?
I live and breathe to enlighten you.
What follows is a cautionary tale to those who search the internet for information on how to work at home as a medical transcriptionist. The rest of us – you know, the choir – can only look on in horror.
How Google ads work
It helps to have some knowledge of how Google ads work. You see them everywhere you go; maybe you’ve wondered how they work (maybe you haven’t!). There are two sides to Google ads: advertisers, who want to place ads (Adwords) and publishers, who run the ads on their sites (Adsense). When an advertiser runs an ad campaign in Adwords, they pay Google. When a publisher places Google Adsense ads on their site, they get paid by Google when someone clicks on a link in the ad. High-volume publishers get enough people to the site to also be paid per 1000 impressions, or the number of times the ads are displayed to users. Low-volume publishers don’t get enough page impressions to make much money this way – they rely on the ad clicks to make money. Google, of course, takes a cut in the middle. The entire system is based on keywords, keyword phrases – the perceived value of the keywords (i.e., the number of people searching that keyword) and the traffic of a publishing site. Advertisers can select keywords relevant to their product (in this case, medical transcription) and they can target specific web sites that get a lot of traffic. The more advertisers there are competing for a keyword phrase, the higher the cost goes because it’s a bidding process. Likewise, the more traffic a site gets and the more advertisers competing to be seen on it, the more it’s going to cost the advertiser.
I could spend days on this, but I’ll try and keep it simple because that’s not the focus of this topic.
Let’s say I want to place ads for my MT jobs site on a bunch of MT-related web sites that run Google ads, using the keyword phrase medical transcription. And let’s say that specifically, I want my ads to display at MT Chat. I start an ad campaign in my Google Adwords account and specify the keyword phrase medical transcription, then I select the option to target specific web sites. Google will retrieve a list of sites for me, but I don’t need them to – I know I want my ads to run at MT Chat. I then bid on how much I want to pay per click and what my daily budget is for the campaign. Now, I can bid whatever I like – I can say I’ll pay $0.25 per click. And Adwords will let me do that – but they’ll also pop up a message saying that my ad has a slim-to-none chance of ever showing up on MT Chat. Why? Because medical transcription is a high-value keyword phrase and MT Chat is a high-volume site, so there are a lot of advertisers targeting not only the keyword phrase, but the web site, as well. The more you’re willing to pay, the better chance you have of your ads showing up on the specified web site. Adwords lets me know that other advertisers are paying more for that phrase and makes a suggestion as to how much I might have to pay to have my ad show up there. The more I’m willing to pay, the better my chances are of having my ad seen. There are keywords that are paying advertisers a handsome amount (mesothelioma was a popular one for quite awhile and paid upwards of $30 per click!). If I choose not to target a specific site, it’s cheaper – my ads will show up on any page where the term medical transcription is found, which is why you see ads related to the topic in a discussion forum.
How this translates to medical transcription and matchbook schools
There is a thriving business on the internet known as internet marketing. Some people are very good at it, some are very bad at it, but what is pertinent to the readers here at MT Exchange is this: medical transcription careers is a very lucrative niche for internet marketers.
If you search the term medical transcription in Google, what you get in return is a mixed bag of sites about medical transcription services, medical transcription training and medical transcription courses. In the Google search results world, medical transcription is a very competitive term. People who want to work at home seem to be one of America’s greatest renewable resources; and as we all know, medical transcription has been an attractive work-at-home career for a very long time. There are approximately 18,000 searches a day for the term medical transcription. That’s a lot of searches. To give you an idea of how competitive this term is, there are over 1.8 million web pages that contain the term and over 800,000 pages that contain the term in the title.
The web site that gets to the #1 spot in the Google search engine results (SER) is the big winner, capturing a huge portion of the traffic. Currently in that spot is Gatline Education Services. Gatline is not an AHDI-approved school and some of you probably haven’t even ever heard of it. So what do they get for being in the #1 spot? They will get 45% more clicks than the #2 site, which is currently the Department of Labor site. All I can say is Gatline must have some awesome people working on their search engine optimization because Google weighs government sites ahead of commercial sites in their results. The farther down the list a site is, the less likely it will be seen – the drop in clicks between the #1 and the #2 spot is bad, worse for #3 and progressively worse down the list, so that if a site isn’t in the top 5 results, it has a very small chance of being seen. While Gatline doesn’t run Google ads, being in the #1 spot means that anyone searching for medical transcription is more likely to click on their site than any other – which means they get more traffic.
In the internet marketing world, it would be foolish to try and compete for the #1 (or even #2-5) spot for this keyword phrase. The advice is – pick something that has fewer searches but also less competition. Sure, the ad revenue will be less, but your chances of getting to the #1 spot are much better – and something is better than nothing.
Here’s an example: if you were an Adsense publisher in the #1 spot for the keyword phrase medical transcription, the anticipated revenue you’d receive from having Google ads on your site would be (drumroll please) – nearly $27,000 per day. That number is based on the number of searches and the statistics for searchers not only clicking through to view that #1 site, but also clicking on the ads (and believe me – Google is all about statistics and therefore so is anyone with a serious web-based business).
On the flip side of that, medical transcription schools is searched only approximately 250 times a day and the site holding down the #1 position could expect Adsense revenue of approximately $1,000 per day. While nothing close to the $27,000 per day for medical transcription, it’s still nothing to sneeze at, and there’s less competition. There are only approximately 30,000 sites mentioning the phrase and only 16,000 sites using the phrase in the page title. That’s why, if you search the specific term “medical transcription schools,” you get a lot of crappy sites dedicated to nothing more than providing Google ads and affiliate sales for one of the schools that offers a high affiliate payout. (Google isn’t the only way to make money on the internet.) Currently sitting in the #1 spot is an affiliate site for Allied – which is also not an AHDI-approved school.
The obvious benefit to someone like Gatline Education – which doesn’t run Google ads – is capturing a huge share of the search market and selling to them directly. They’re capturing people who are already interested in what they’re selling and they are getting more of them than any of the other sites selling similar products/services.
Apparently, the more credible schools don’t feel the need to improve their search engine rankings – or they just don’t know how all this works. If there were more of them showing up in the top 5 spots for the search engines, there’d be fewer hopefuls shunting off to the questionable schools.
The site that got me started
No, I’m not going to give them the pleasure of a link. But it was an awful/funny exercise in targeted keywords by an affiliate marketer. The site is owned by someone in India. I could’ve guessed that, even without checking the domain name registry. It’s targeting medical transcription keyword phrases (the low-lying fruit ones). They’re giving away an “Easy Cash Blueprint” e-book – but you have to provide an e-mail address to get it, which means that address will be spammed from a mailing list in the hopes of selling you products. At the very least, they’re hoping visitors will click on the Google ads at the site.
There’s the really awful content (I’ve italicized the obvious keyword phrase being targeted by this marketer):
I am sure your quest for Medical Transcription Book has come to an end as you read this article. Yes, gone are those days when we have to search endlessly for Medical Transcription Book information or other such information like protein protein comparison, free voice to text software, transcription desk or even group transcription services. Even without articles such as this, with the Internet all you have to do is log on and use any of the search engines to find the Medical Transcription Book information you need.
If this article still doesn’t answer your specific Medical Transcription Book quest, then don’t forget that you can conduct more search on any of the major search engines like Search.Yahoo.com to get specific Medical Transcription Book information.
A career in medical transcription has a lot been going for it. Here we are facing an economic downturn and this field is only likely to thrive in these times. The medical transcription industry is set to steadily grow as the population ages.
All that useful information crap was packed into one article! First of all – would you read that garbage and then buy something? Better yet – would you want someone who read it and then paid for it to be working next to you?
Just as a note, medical transcription book gets a little over 100 searches a day. If this bozo captures the #1 spot in the search results for that term, there’s a good chance of making about $100/day from the Google ads. Heck, there are MTs who don’t make that much! Unfortunately for this hapless marketer, this site doesn’t even turn up in the top 10 of the results (although it is on the first page). With a little more work, it might make it there!
Here’s another one:
Title: Free Medical Transcription Helpful Information
As you devour this article, remember that the rest of it contains valuable information related to Free Medical Transcription and in some way related to home based medical transcription jobs, transcription from home, medical transcription position or global medical transcription for your reading pleasure.
(skip to the end) It might interest you to know that lots of folks searching for Free Medical Transcription also got information related to other medical billing, sirna delivery, and even transcription services bangalore here with ease.
Again, the obvious keyword stuffing that tells you nothing and frequently doesn’t even make sense. In one article at this site, the keywords were actually preceded by the word keyword. (where’s my rolling eyes icon?) I don’t even know what sirna delivery is – but I know it makes no sense in this article.
And my personal favorite wins the award for complete nonsense. This is the first paragraph:
If your major interest is information related to Learn Medical Transcription or any other such as medical transcription job opportunities, transcription systems, allegiant transcription services or dictation services, this article can prove useful.
Nonsensical use of keyword phrases is a sign of a novice who found the keyword phrases with low competition, but didn’t use half a brain cell in applying them to the article. I’d rather think that than think this person’s English is so awful this actually makes sense to them. In addition, this bright marketer apparently researched the keyword phrases that were low competition and discovered that Allegiant transcription services fit the bill – and so it was included in this garbled paragraph!
The next time someone online asks you about a matchbook school, ask them where they learned about it. Chances are, it was through the internet version of a matchbook.
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