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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.

How Google My Business Helps Grow Your Dental Practice

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google-my-business-welcome

Last year Google launched Google My Business, a single platform for managing all of Google’s services for businesses. With the new integrated platform, you can work off just one screen to manage how your dental practice appears on:

  • Google Maps: Update valuable practice information, add photos or virtual tours of your office
  • Reviews: Manage your Google reviews and view other reviews around the web
  • Google+: A social platform where you can post photos, text, videos, events and links
  • Insights: After verifying your practice, you can view insight into your Google+ analytics to manage metrics such as visibility, engagement and audience
  • Google Analytics: Check your analytics and learn more about your practice website’s visitors
  • Hangouts: You can start a video chat with your patients right from the platform

Here’s the video from Google introducing the new service.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCzri4tXuF0

How Google My Business Helps Dental Offices

Improve Online Visibility of Your Practice

Through Google My Business, your dentistry will gain visibility on Search, Maps, and Google+ across all devices. These are all very important channels for getting dental patients online.

Share Updates and Offers with Your Followers

Google My Business will help you interact with your followers on Google+ by sharing useful content and updates about your dental office. You can introduce new products and services to your followers on Google+. You can also run promotions and giveaways to get more appointments and referrals.

Get Valuable Insights into User Behavior

The analytics feature inside Google My Business helps you understand how visitors are finding you on maps, search and Google+, what content is being viewed the most and how many visitors your dentistry profile is attracting. This will help you optimize and improve the performance of your clinic’s Google+ profile.

Manage Patient Reviews

Online patient reviews are very important to the success of your dental marketing efforts. Patients trust what other patients have to say about your practice. Google My Business makes it easier to manage patient feedback, request reviews from new patients and respond to negative reviews left by unhappy patients.

Communicate with Followers through Hangouts

Google Hangouts is a cool video chat feature introduced in Google+ but you can now access it directly from the Google My Business dashboard. Hangouts can help you interact with patients online to discuss various procedures offered by your dental office. You can also use Hangouts to educate patients about oral hygiene and how to prevent tooth decay through regular dental checkups.

As more people turn online to educate themselves about various dental procedures and to find a local dental care provider, you have to ensure that your dental office is not left behind. If you need help with setting up or managing your Google My Business, just submit a free consultation request and we will get back to you asap!