Generating traffic and leads to your medical website will take time. Even if you already applied all of the necessary SEO strategies to your website, you can’t expect to see the results in a short period of time. With traditional SEO strategies, it usually takes a couple of weeks or even months for the results to become obvious.
However, do you know that there is a strategy that digital marketers use to yield faster results?
With the intensity of the competition in the digital marketing world, medical practices find and utilize all means so that they can get an edge over their competition and succeed in their digital marketing efforts. While SEO is a great way to drive organic traffic to your website, it can take some time before you reap the benefits of your digital marketing efforts.
That is why medical practices should take full use of paid search to drive instant visibility but also to boost the results of SEO. SEO and paid search work hand-in-hand to ensure that you will have a successful digital marketing campaign. You can use SEO concepts to optimize your Ad campaigns and increase their effectiveness.
But, where should you start?
Google AdWords is the most popular and most effective option for medical practices. Google is the largest search engine in the world and running your Ad campaigns in Google will let you reach a wide audience in your local area.
How can Google AdWords help medical practices?
With Google AdWords, you will be able to leverage keywords to create campaigns and Ads in the Google search engine. Compared to pure SEO strategies, Google Ad campaigns will help you achieve your marketing goals much quicker.
Here are more reasons why your medical should be running Google Ad campaigns today.
#1 Pay Only When a Patient Clicks
Most medical practices, especially independent ones, do not have a big budget when it comes to advertising. That’s why Google Ads is the perfect tool for effective advertising.
You only pay for the ad for each click generated. You can control your budget for the ads by setting a maximum budget limit you want to spend each month.
#2 Custom-Tailored Ads
Google AdWords allows you to set specific demographics for your ads. This way, you can make your ads appear to patients who are more likely to buy from you in or near your targeted area. You can also set your ads to appear in certain geographical locations and around a radius of your targeted location or groups of locations.
Google Ads location targeting is a powerful tool that you can use to target patients who are in or near the location of your practice.
#3 Get to Know Your Patients
Since Google Ads allows you to create Ads tailored to your targeted audience, you will be able to get to know your patients’ behaviors well. You can offer personalized services to them which in turn will provide them with great customer experience.
Running Ads require you to create personas that you will be targeting. Through these personas, you will be able to know what the patients are looking for which you can deliver when they finally visit you for your services.
#4 Google Ads is a Great Way to Increase Revenue
Your main goal of running Ads is to increase your revenue, right?
Google Ads can greatly help you with that. It is an almost basic instinct of patients to turn to Google to find solutions to their medical concerns. Data says that 7% of Google’s daily searches are health-related, and the search engine receives around 70,000 searches per minute.
Ensuring success in Google Ads means more patients will find you and choose your services.
#5 Monitor Your Competitors
Google offers a wealth of digital marketing tools for medical practices. Using these tools will not only allow you to bid for keywords for your own Ads and web pages but will also let you see which keywords your competitors are using.
You can also check the performance of each of your competitors’ websites and find out their top-performing pages when it comes to the Google Ads they are running. There are tools that you can use to find which keywords your competitors buy on Google Ads, one of which is Spyfu.
Spyfu shows important statistics such as the cost per click and search volume of the keywords that your competitors use as well as how much they are spending on advertising approximately. With this data, you can improve your SEO and Ad campaign strategies by adapting and adjusting your strategies to beat your competitors.
#6 Boost Your Online Reputation
We cover how you can manage your online reputation in one of our articles, and we have established that Google plays an important role in boosting and managing your online reputation. With Google Ads, you can use extensions such as site links to your reviews page so that potential customers can see what other patients are saying about your practice.
#7 Track Your Online Performance
Google AdWords lets you track the performance of your Ads using a tool called Conversions. Conversions tell you the results of your ads by tracking information such as the number of calls that you received, the number of patients who signed up for a membership or the number of patients who opt for your newsletters, promotions, or etc.
#8 A Viable Option to Rank Better in Local Searches
In the past, Google’s local search results used to show 7 businesses that are related to your local search term. This was called the Google 7-pack. This made it easier for the top 7 businesses to get customers because they were heavily highlighted in the Google local search results. However, Google recently cut down this 7-pack into a 3-pack.
This means that only 3 businesses are now highlighted whenever someone searches for a particular keyword. This is very helpful for medical practices to get more patients because the top 3 medical practices that Google shows in its local pack search results will get a bigger slice of the pie.
Of course, it will be harder to get into the 3-pack. If you want to make it into the top 3, you will need more engagement in Google. Moreover, your Ads can also show up in the 3-pack. By using location extensions, Ads containing your medical practice’s address, the distance to your office location or the map of your office can show up when people are searching for medical practices nearby.
#9 Improve Your Marketing Strategies
Running various Ad campaigns over a certain period of time will allow you to find out which campaigns are effective and which are not. Because paid Ads campaigns pay off quickly compared to SEO.
However, running SEO and paid ad campaigns together will provide you greater results than running them individually. For example, if you want to keep your high-cost and low-converting keywords, you can use them to create content on your website instead of using them in your Ads.
Also, using high-performing keywords on both your paid ads and organic content will add up to the total volume of traffic that you generate. Since paid Ads provide results faster, you can also test the success of your keywords on Ad campaigns before you commit them to a long-term SEO strategy.
Not all clicks generated by organic search result to conversion, but Ads can help you to retarget those who have an initial interaction with you through organic search. You can remarket and create Ads with customized messaging that are based on the keywords that patients use in organic search.
#10 Paid Ads Offer Stability
Google often updates its algorithm and this disrupts the organic search results. However, this has a little and manageable effect on paid Ads. Google updates do not often make a huge difference in the way paid Ads are run so it is easier to improve your ROI with Ad campaigns.
Med Rank Interactive is a digital marketing agency in Charlotte, NC. We help independent medical and multi-location medical practices to effectively and successfully run Google ad campaigns. Contact us to learn more.
