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Six Ways to Supercharge Your Dental Office’s PPC Campaign

Author: Ben Norris
Ben Norris

Ben Norris

Ben Norris is a copywriter and digital strategist for My Digital Dentistry, a Phoenix, Arizona-based online marketing firm that specializes in helping dental offices from across the country attract new patients and hyperfocus their marketing efforts. When he’s not at work, Ben enjoys camping, hiking, and backpacking throughout the Southwest and beyond.
04.18.16 / 9:50 am

If you’ve searched on Google lately, you’ve probably noticed an important trend: organic results keep getting pushed lower and lower with the paid ads getting all that prime real estate. In competitive areas such as dentistry, non-paid search results are not even being displayed above the fold in many instances. That means even if you rank in the top position organically, a potential patient still has some scrolling to do if they are going to see you in the results.

So what does this mean for your dental practice?

If you are not running an effective Google Adwords campaign, you’re missing out on a lot of traffic and potential customers. And don’t think just creating an account and running a couple of ads to your home page is enough.

While having a few ads that take visitors to existing pages on your website might work out occasionally, there are a few things your practice can do to break through the lackluster ROI and start seeing real results.

Copy is King

Professional and effective copywriting doesn’t come cheap, but is the very foundation of a successful campaign. Your practice’s ad copy and landing page copy should be clean, professionally written, thoughtful, and engineered to convert. Of course, keywords are an important part of the equation, but your search ad text will really make your ad stand out from the pack.

Dedicated PPC Landers

Are all your ads going to existing pages on your site, or even worse, the home page? You are missing the boat in a big way. For example, if you are advertising for the search phrase “family dentistry,” you need to have a dedicated landing page themed for family dentistry. The copy on this page should be short, sweet, and professionally written with strong calls to action.

Even if you already have a page themed for the paid term you want to target and it ranks organically, it isn’t designed or optimized to convert PPC traffic. Paid search marketing is a different beast altogether and should be treated accordingly. Create a separate PPC lander and work with your web developer to make sure the PPC lander cannot be crawled by Google’s organic bots, but is still open to the Ad-bots.

Now you are giving yourself an opportunity to hyper-focus your dental PPC campaign, achieve higher ad placement, and pay less for higher quality clicks.

Track Your Conversions

Potential patients are probably contacting your office in one of two ways:

  • A fill form on your website
  • Calling the phone number listed on your site

Fortunately, both of these can be easily tracked. You should always have both phone calls and contact form fills listed as conversions in Adwords. With forms fills, you’ll want to create separate “thank you” pages for each landing page. Google will provide you with a code snippet for each page. Once that code is implemented, you’ll know every time someone fills out the form.

Call tracking is also important. At My Digital Dentistry, we use specialty call tracking software that can tell our clients how many phone calls their ads generated.

This data will help you determine what areas are yielding results and where you want to focus or decrease your efforts.

Set Up Remarketing

Let’s say someone clicks on your ad, visits your website, and then leaves without making any effort to contact you. You just paid for a click that amounted to jack, right? Not if you are using remarketing.

With remarketing, you can create a display ad campaign that serves your AdWords ad specifically to people who have visited your website. That means people who were already interested in your practice, but didn’t convert on the first visit, will continue seeing your ads when they search the web and visit other websites.

This is often just the push many potential patients need to visit your site again and set up that appointment. It’s not uncommon for someone to click an ad one day, and convert a couple weeks or a month later.

Use Sitelink Extensions

These extensions have been a game changer for our dental clients because they basically allow you to extend ads with locational information, phone numbers, and links that take users to other targeted pages on your website. Aside from improving click-through rates, these extensions serve another important purpose – real estate.

Everyone is fighting for a certain amount of coveted screen space on Google’s search results and when you use sitelink extensions, you get a lot more space for your budget. Considering that adding these extensions doesn’t cost anything, and could actually save you money by improving CTR and quality scores, there’s no reason not to use them.

Radius Targeting

Chances are you are more likely to convert potential patients the closer they live to your practice. Radius targeting allows you to hyperfocus your message and bidding strategy to get more out of your budget. Let’s say you only want to target people within 10 miles of your office; use radius targeting to make that happen, rather than filtering by ZIP code.

You can even adjust your bidding strategy to pay more for clicks when searchers are within closer proximity to your office. A click from someone within two miles of your office might be worth $20 to you, while someone 10 miles out might only be worth $8, because your odds of converting that click diminish depending on the distance someone would have to travel to visit your office.

In Summary

The above-mentioned pointers are relatively straightforward adjustments, but ones that could be time consuming for many dental practices. These suggestions also just barely start to scratch the surface when it comes to optimizing your paid search campaign.

Ideally, your practice is working with a web developer, designer, and copywriter who can help you grow your PPC campaign and take care of the technical aspects on your behalf. You may also want to consider hiring someone to optimize and monitor your paid performance, if it is something your practice can afford. At My Digital Dentistry, we specialize in helping dental practices improve their online marketing efforts and bring in new patients.

Ben Norris

Ben Norris is a copywriter and digital strategist for My Digital Dentistry, a Phoenix, Arizona-based online marketing firm that specializes in helping dental offices from across the country attract new patients and hyperfocus their marketing efforts. When he’s not at work, Ben enjoys camping, hiking, and backpacking throughout the Southwest and beyond.

Ben Norris

Ben Norris

Ben Norris is a copywriter and digital strategist for My Digital Dentistry, a Phoenix, Arizona-based online marketing firm that specializes in helping dental offices from across the country attract new patients and hyperfocus their marketing efforts. When he’s not at work, Ben enjoys camping, hiking, and backpacking throughout the Southwest and beyond.

7 responses to “Six Ways to Supercharge Your Dental Office’s PPC Campaign”

  1. Nice to see the PPC campaign for dental clinic. PPC is the one type of marketing stretagy in search engine (Google). It helps to improve your business leads.

  2. Great blog Ben. There is definitely a great deal of traffic where most businesses are missing out on especially when users searches for their business online.

    These tips you pointed out can also work to increase leads for other business vertical as well.

  3. Fascinating read!!! In the world of digital online dental marketing there is so much to understand and this article is a great intro. As a dentist trying to capture new patients it is increasingly important to utilize all the digital marketing tools possible. Thanks for the great tips.

  4. This post gives the idea of what is happening with the search results ranking. With the right setup of google Adwords, a campaign will help your website make it to the top. Taking advice from some google certified partners will be a great help to increase success rate. http://www.spargoconnect.com

  5. Hi Ben,
    It’s a great summary how to increase the efficiency of a PPC campaign. I think the largest impact is dedicated landing pages that can increase your conversion rate by 20-30% or even more. There is one other thing I would add to you list and those are the negative keywords which can protect you from clicks worth much less or even worth nothing.

    We put together a list of negative keywords that we think everyone should use for dental PPC campaigns:
    http://www.optimumclick.co.uk/must-negative-keywords-ppc-search-campaigns-5-dental-clinics/

    What do you think?

  6. Great post Ben! Thanks for getting SEO information out there and available to dentist clinics that need it! Another way to increase local ranking on Google is to get more Google Reviews and a higher rating. Companies like chekkit and podium specialize in helping local companies get more Google reviews.

  7. SMILEKRAFTERS: We’re really glad to tell that, your blog is really helpful. it briefs us all about “Six Ways to Supercharge Your Dental Office’s PPC Campaign” in Deep details.
    We have also dental experts here at SMILEKRAFTERS, So please kindly do visit our site too.

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