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PPC or SEO: An Effective Dental Marketing Plan Uses Both

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When it comes to marketing your dental practice with search engines, you have two options to choose from – SEO or PPC advertising. Both these search engine marketing strategies have their pros and cons. In an earlier post I have discussed the benefits of PPC advertising with Google Adwords. In this post we will go over the benefits of SEO for dentists and then discuss how both SEO and PPC can complement each other to create a solid dental marketing plan.

SEO vs PPC Advertising

Advantages of SEO

The main benefit of SEO is it’s long term residual value in that the work you perform today will continue to deliver results for several months and years into the future. In that sense, SEO is like investing money into the future search traffic of your website. However, like any investment, SEO has a payout period and in case of most local dental websites it would be around 3-6 months before you start seeing significant search traffic resulting from your SEO campaigns.

When compared to PPC advertising, the main benefit of SEO is that it has no per click/visitor fee unlike PPC where you are charged for every click. A PPC campaign is more like a current expense where the money you spend on clicks is gone forever. The moment you stop spending, all the traffic and patients you were getting form the PPC campaign will also stop. Whereas, with SEO, once you obtain good rankings, you can hold them for some time without any spending anything on SEO during that period. Therefore, in the long run say in 12 months period, SEO will have a better ROI than PPC advertising (and most other forms of advertising).

Dental SEO vs PPC ROI
The cost per patient acquisition from PPC advertising remains constant over time while for SEO it reduces with time.

Another benefit SEO enjoys over PPC is that dental patients trust organic results more than PPC ads. This fact has been confirmed through multiple surveys where consumers rate organic results as more credibile than the search ads. Therefore, if you want your practice to appear more trustworthy than another local dental office who ranks well in organic search results, then you need to invest in SEO to compete with them.

Given the above facts, we can safely conclude that SEO is not an option but almost a necessity if you want to consistently generate dental patients online. But what to do with the first 3-4 months of SEO when there is no search traffic. This is where PPC advertising campaign can help fill the gap.

Combining SEO and PPC

Combining PPC with SEO
Start with a PPC campaign and reduce advertising budget as SEO traffic grows

You plan your search marketing strategy to generate a minimum number of new patients per month – let’s assume this target is 30. In the beginning, SEO will not be generating any traffic. Therefore, you have to run a PPC advertising campaign to generate all 30 patients. As your SEO traffic grows over the subsequent months it will start generating new patients. That is when you can start cutting back on your PPC advertising spend since some of the targeted 30 patients/month is now being born by the SEO work. Eventually off course you want to be in a situation where all 30 patients are being generated by SEO alone and you do not need any PPC advertising to meet your external marketing target for new dental patients.

When you have achieved your initial SEO targets, you have two options

A) You stop the PPC campaign and continue investing in SEO. This is perfectly normal and if you are happy with the number of new patients you generate with SEO then so be it. Just remember that a competitor may take your advertising spot.

B) You revise your new patients per month target upwards and continue with the PPC advertising campaign. If you want to get even more new dental patients and cant wait for your website to gain rankings on additional keywords, then PPC advertising is the way to go.

4 Ways to Get Dental Patients from Google without a Website

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The most common way to get traffic form Google is by optimizing your website and getting it ranked on first page of for your target keywords. The other alternative is PPC advertising which can be costly. However, while ranking a website is the best long term strategy for getting search traffic, there are other ‘free’ options available. In this post we discuss 4 methods of getting dental patients from Google Search without ranking your website.

Google My Business Page of Your Dental Office

Your Google My Business Listing is your opportunity to rank in the local 3-pack section of local search results. Make sure you follow Google guidelines and recommended best practices when setting up the Google My Business page for your dental office. Collect some patient reviews, add some relevant content and build citations on local directories and data aggregators. Your Google My Business Page should be ranking on first page of Google soon! An example is shown below.

Google My Business Page Ranking

Dentist Youtube Video

The future of web is Video. But even today video marketing and video content is gaining traction. Youtube (also owned by Google) is the most popular video sharing website in google and popular youtube videos often make there way on the first page of google. Make sure you use your target keywords in the video title, tags and description. Also share the video as much as you can to increase the number of likes and number of embeds. An example of a very competitive dentist keyword with a youtube video ranked on the first page is captured below.

Dentist Video Ranking

You can watch the video here

Local Directory Listing of Your Dental Practice

Local Directory websites like Yelp, Yellowpages and Superpages are great for promoting your dental office online. Similarly dentist review sites like Rate a Dentist, Health Grades and Zoc Doc are also useful for getting new patients. However, with some optimization you can rank your dentist listing on these sites in Google. Specially Yelp and Yellowpages are two websites that are consistently coming up for local dentist related searches. Here is an example of a very competitive keyword.

Dentist Yelp Listing SEO

Here are the links to the 2 yelp profiles seen in the image above

http://www.yelp.com/biz/meyerland-family-dentistry-houston

http://www.yelp.com/biz/bristles-family-dentistry-houston

Dental Office Page on Social Media Sites

Social media marketing is a great way of getting new patients but you can use your facebook business/fan page to rank in google search. Optimize the facebook page as you would optimize your website. That is make sure the page title and description has your target keywords. Publish engaging content on your page and increase the number of likes and followers. Also share your facebook page as much as you can to increase number of followers and back-links from other sites. Here is an example of a dentist ranking their facebook page for a very competitive keyword

Dental Facebook Page SEO

You can visit this facebook page here https://www.facebook.com/MichaelJWeiDDS

Note that there is a yelp listing of another dentist ranking just above this facebook page.

PPC Advertising for Dentists: Maximise Profit NOT ROI

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Before starting any advertising campaign for your dental practice, you need to specify some goals for the campaign. A lot of dentists who are not familiar with PPC advertising would choose a specific ROI like 300% or 400% for their campaigns without knowing that they might be losing money by setting up such a high ROI goal. As a dentist your ultimate goal is to maximize your profit after deducting advertising cost. So instead of giving your ppc manager a budget and asking him to maximize marketing ROI while staying within budget, you need to tell him to maximize your net profit while staying within budget.

why?

because PPC advertising has a diminishing marginal return beyond a maximum ROI, as the advertising spend increases. This means that as your advertising spend increases beyond a threshold, your ROI begins to decrease. Read that last sentence again and look at the graph below of a typical PPC campaign.

marketing-return-on-investment-graph

During the early phase of any PPC campaign you will find that ROI increases as you optimize the campaign. Then you increase your advertising budget and optimize some more. After that you keep increasing budget and optimize the campaign further until you hit a Peak ROI of the campaign. At this stag all the main avenues of optimization have been exhausted and the campaign is optimized for maximum ROI. Further optimization of ads, keywords, bids etc, will not result in improving ROI. However, the profit resulting from the campaign is not at it’s maximum at this stage. This is because in order to achieve maximum ROI, you have sacrificed some low ROI traffic that would earn you more net profit.

If your goal was to maximise your campaign ROI, then you would be right in maintaining the campaign in this state for as long as possible. However, doing so would mean that you are leaving a significant amount of profit on the table, since your PPC campaign is not optimized for maximum profit but for maximum ROI. Therefore, if you want to squeeze out last chunk of profit from your PPC campaign, you need to ignore your ROI goals and focus on increasing spend on less efficient but still profitable keywords/audiences. You have to continue increase spend until, the incremental profit resulting from an increase ad spend is equal to the incremental ad spend. At that stage, the campaign is optimized for maximum profit. Increasing ad spend of the campaign any further would result in a negative profit incremental profit and thus reduce total profit from the campaign.

One final point to note is that maximum revenue doesn’t occur until after maximum profit has been achieved. Therefore, you should revenue interchangeable with profit as it can mislead you into increase your advertising spend more than required.

7 Reasons Why Every Dentist Should Try Google Adwords

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The growing use of internet as a medium for marketing has lead to many innovations in online advertising. One of these great innovations from early 2000’s is Google Adwords. What started as a search advertising program is now a full blow advertising network reaching almost 85% of all web users on most popular websites like Google.com and Youtube.com. With Google Adwords PPC advertising you are charged only when somebody click on your ad rather than CPM model, where you are charged for every 1000 impressions your ad receives irrespective of how many people actually interact with your ad. Below are 7 reasons why all dentists should try Google Adwords PPC Advertising.

Advantages of Google Adwords

Speed-to-market

Google Adwords is very quick to setup and get started. It can deliver results very quickly. This is a huge advantage in situations where you need new patients fast or you have a great service/offer that you want to push out before your competitors. Most other alternatives require development of creatives which can can time consuming.

Location and language targeting

Do you wish to target hispanic dental patients only? With google adwords language targeting you can do that very easily. Google Adwords also has very comprehensive location targeting features. You can target residents of certain zip codes, cities and towns or better yet a 10-mile radius around your dental office. Remember the closer a prospective patient is to your office, the more likelier they are to visit. You can also exclude languages and locations that you want to avoid.

Pay for Qualified Clicks Only

Using the Google Adwords Search network, you can advertise to people who are looking for a dentist in your city. These people are highly interested in professional dental treatment and you can offer your service to them by advertising on google for relevant keywords. What is even more impressive is that you can exclude keywords to avoid showing your ad for irrelevant keywords. For e.g. if you do not treat children you can add keywords like children, kids, paediatric etc. as negatives to ensure that anyone who is searching for paediatric dentists does not see your ad. This way you will attract clicks only from qualified visitors who are interested in your service.

Granular Control Over Advertising Spend

A Google Adwords can be started for as little as $5/day. While that may not get you much clicks, it just goes to show that you can control your advertising cost depending on your marketing budget for the month/week. You can also control how much you want to pay per click for each keyword you want your ad to appear on. This granular control allows you to run the campaign, stop the campaign, adjust bids up or down, adjust budget up or down and activate/pause the campaign whenever you want. e.g. If you have plenty of appointments next week, you can keep the campaign paused. If you want to fill up your schedule for the subsequent week, you can re-activate the campaign again before the preceding week begins.

Visitor Retargeting

Another amazing feature Google Adwords offers is the ability to tag and then re-target people who visited your website. This feature works for both search and display network and is very useful in reaching visitors who abandoned your website. For e.g. You can use re-marketing ads to target visitors who left appointment form or contact form uncompleted with a discount offer to convince them to make an appointment.

Performance Tracking and Reports

Google Adwords has the most comprehensive tracking and reporting features of any popular advertising platform. You can track click to calls, calls from websites, calls from ads, form completions, app installs, downloads and even import your google analytics conversion goals into your adwords account. These conversion actions are then backed by in-depth reports of all aspects of campaign performance that allow you to evaluate the success of each campaign. All these conversion tracking and reporting are free for all advertisers irrespective of their ad spend.

Campaign Optimization Capabilities

Google Adwords comes built in with free campaign optimization tools that allow you to maximize the performance of your campaigns to deliver your desired conversions. For e.g. your goal is to generate a maximum number of online appointments, you can create a conversion in adwords to track the number of appointment form completions. Then once your campaign has had over 15 conversions over the last 30 days, you can enable conversion optimizer and define your target maximum or target patient acquisition cost. You can then sit back and let Google Adwords Conversion Optimizer run your campaign on auto pilot. It will adjust your CPC on keywords automatically to generate the highest number of conversions (appointments in this example) possible in your budget.

Google My Business Page Best Practices for Dental Offices

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Google is the central hub of all online marketing activities you conduct for your dental practice. In this short guide, we list the best practices you need to follow to optimize your Google My Business profile for better visibility in local search results.

Google My Business

Keep your personal profile separate from local business page

Many dentists still have no idea how to bring their traditional style of business to the online space.

Personal Page is the profile used by the person who owns or manages the Google My Business account, and is generated automatically after a person creates pages on Google My Business. Anyone can create a personal profile on Google+ to interact with their friends on the platform so how will you differentiate between your friends or social network and your patients or followers.

As a dentist, it’s easy to think, “I’m the person my practice is named after, so using this account should be fine.”

No. Never use personal pages to represent your dental office on Google My Business. For that, you need a local business page.

The local business page is what appears on local search results, providing information on reviews, address and contact information. To validate the data on this page, Google My Business requires verification, usually through a letter sent to the official business address or a phone call.

Claiming Ownership

Only business owners or authorized representatives may verify and manage their business information on Google My Business. If you wish to share management access to your local page with others, you can add a manager. Examples of authorized representatives include: a third-party SEO/SEM company; a friend of the business owner; an online ordering, scheduling, or booking provider; and an affiliate network provider.

Before you can start promoting your page, you need to verify that you are in fact the owner of this business. While this verification process protects you from duplicate and bad listings, it can be a headache for dental practices, which have several front-facing people representing the business. Therefore, make sure that all your receptionist/staff know that you are expecting a call or letter from Google.

Make sure the business information is complete and accurate

Name: Your name should reflect your practice’ real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to patients. Any additional information, when relevant, can be included in other sections of your business information (e.g., “Address”, “Categories”).

Adding unnecessary information to your name (e.g., “Google Inc. – Mountain View Corporate Headquarters” instead of “Google”) by including marketing taglines, codes, special characters, hours or closed/open status, phone numbers, website URLs, service/product information, location/address or directions, or containment information (e.g. “Chase ATM in Duane Reade”) is not permitted.

Address: Use a precise, accurate address to describe your office location. PO Boxes or mailboxes located at remote locations are not acceptable.

Phone Number: Provide a phone number that connects to your dental office as directly as possible. Use a local phone number instead of central, call center helpline number whenever possible. Do not provide phone numbers that redirect to phone numbers other than those of the actual office.

Website: Provide one website that represents your individual office location. Do not provide URLs that redirect users to landing pages other than those of the actual office, including pages created on social media sites.

Choose the most appropriate, specific categories for your dental practice

Categories help your patients find accurate, specific results for services they’re interested in. In order to keep your business information accurate and live, make sure that you:

  1. Use as few categories as possible to describe your overall core business from the provided list.
  2. Choose categories that are as specific as possible, but representative of your main business.
  3. Do not use categories solely as keywords or to describe attributes of your business.
  4. Do not use categories that pertain to other businesses that are nearby or related, such as a business physically contained within your business or an entity that contains your business.

Establish a strong, accurate presence on the web

  1. Google improves search results by aggregating information about your dental practice from all over the web. Make sure information about your office on third-party sites (like Yelp.com) is accurate, and try to contact the respective site directly to correct any inaccurate information.
  2. Encourage customers to review your business by clicking “Write a review” on the local Google+ page.

If you need help with optimizing the Google+ Local page of your dental practice, just submit a free consultation request and we will get back to you asap!

5 Simple Ways to Improve Your Dental Website SEO

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Google Search algorithms take into account some 200 factors to rank pages and websites. However, some of these factors are more important than others and ignoring them will not help your website rank. In this post I have listed 5 things you can do to make your dental website rank higher in Google.

website seo factors

Quality and Quantity of Inbound Links to Domain

Links are by far the most important factor for ranking in Google and other search engines. Now before you start any link-building, just keep in mind that quality is better than quantity. It is better to have a few high quality links then many low quality links. Any link that is public and you can show to your patients is a good link and any link on a page that you do not want your patients to see is spam.

As a dentist, you have many easy opportunities to build high quality links. Just think of how many directories, review sites and insurance sites there are for dentists. In addition, you can get links from most local business directories and chamber of commerce website of your city. Approach your vendors to add your website link on their clients/testimonials page. I am sure your janitor, office designer, website designer, marketing company, dental equipment supplier and others would love to get a testimonial from you.

Once the easy links have been created, try approaching local churches, charities, schools, meet-ups and sports teams. See if you can get a link in their sponsor section by donating or sponsoring their work. Then move on to the local press. See if you can get a column or an interview done on a local news paper or radio website. And it doesn’t end here. You can approach any legitimate local or national website for links as long as it gets your website in front of real people.

City, State in Most/All Website Title Tags

By adding the city and state in title tags of your dental website you want to emphasize the local nature of your website pages. This is very important since all your patients are local and every page on your website is meant for local residents. Therefore, you do not want Google to conclude otherwise by excluding the city and state from the page title.

Topical and Geographic Keyword Relevance of Domain Content

Make sure that all pages of your website have the target keywords and city and state in the content. Again this is done to make the page relevant to the topic as well as your local area (City/Neighborhood). This will ensure that Google sees your content as both locally and topically relevant. e.g. if you have a page about dental braces, you need to talk about braces in your city. So any cost and treatment options you discuss on the page should be relevant to your town/city.

Product / Service and Geographic Keyword in Domain

Have you noticed that many of the top ranking dentist websites in Google have a domain name containing the city name or dental related word or both? It is not a coincidence but in fact Google does prefer keyword rich domains because of their relevance. Now since most local searches contain the city/location name e.g. ‘dentist nyc’ or ‘dentures nyc’, having a domain name like familydentistnyc.com or cheapdenturesnyc.com is advantageous than having a general domain like beautifulsmiles.com.

HTML NAP Matching GMB Location NAP

By coding your Name, Address and Phone (NAP) information using schema.org/dentist markup format, you ensure that this information is separately identified and readily available on your website. This prevents confusion for search engines if they find any other numbers and names mentioned on your website or page. In addition, you need to ensure that your website NAP information matches your Google My Business page location NAP information exactly. Inconsistencies between the two may in fact send a negative signal and decrease your website rankings in Google search results.