Dental Marketing Direct

Digital Marketing for Dental Offices

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5 Google Adwords Ad Extensions Every Dentist Should Try

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Google Adwords text ads are limited to just 25 characters in the headline and 2 lines of 35 characters for the description. It is impossible for a dental practice to convey all the important information in such a short character limit. This is where ad extensions come in and help extend your ad with more useful information. These ad extensions are absolutely free and help improve your ad’s visibility in search results because an extended ad covers a larger area. Ad extensions can also improve your ad’s CTR, leading to higher quality score, lower cost per click and thus a better ROI on your ppc advertising spend.

Screenshot of Adwords Ad Extension

Google has introduced many ad extensions to help business enhance their ads with more information. In this post we look at 5 adwords ad extensions that you can use to improve your dental adwords campaign performance.

Location Extension

Location Extension

This extension ads your dental office address below your ad so patients can quickly see where your office is located without having to click your ad to find out. This helps to save you money as only people near your office will click your ad for further information and somebody who is to far away from your office will ignore your ad. You can use this extension by connecting your Google My Business account with your Google Adwords account. Location extensions are very useful and every dentist must take advantage of this feature.

Sitelink Extension

sitelink extension Sitelink extension expand your ad with links to different pages of your website specified by you. These site-links only appear under your ad, if your ad shows above or below the organic listings. Site-links do not show on ads appearing on the side even if you have added them through your account. These extensions have to be manually added as you must specify the links you want to show under your ad and the anchor text for each link. You can also specify 2 description lines of 25 characters each for every sitelink.

Site-links extension helps you direct patients quickly to the most important pages of your website, such as the about page, contact or request appointment page, testimonials page, discount offers page, before and after photos page etc. This allows a person to click on the contact page directly from your ad and request an appointment.

Call Extension

call extensionCall extensions extend your ad with a phone number allowing patients to dial your number without clicking your ad if they are on a desktop or clicking the ad to dial your number if they see your ad on a mobile device. In most cases calls are more valuable than clicks and therefore, your dental ppc campaign is incomplete without call extensions. Call extensions will continue to become more important as more and more people use mobile devices and smartphones to look for local dentists. Google also provides free tracking numbers to track the performance of your call extensions.

Callout Extension

callout extensionCallout extensions help expand your ad with more information about your dental office and treatment procedures. You can use callout extensions to add unique information that distinguishes your dental practice from the competitors in the area. Note that callout extensions only appear if your ad shows above or below the organic listings and do not appear for right side ads.

Structured Snippets

structured snippet extensionStructured snippets are similar callout extensions except that you can only use structured snippets within a category or header. Google will only show snippets of one category at a time. Again, structured snippets only appear on ads showing above or below organic listings and do not appear on right side ads. Here’s a list of available headers:

  • Amenities
  • Brands
  • Courses
  • Degree programs
  • Destinations
  • Featured hotels
  • Insurance coverage
  • Neighborhoods
  • Service catalog
  • Shows
  • Styles
  • Types

Immediately you can see that amenities and insurance coverage are relevant to any dental adwords campaign.

Now that you know what ad extensions to use, why not try them out on your dental adwords campaigns. You can learn more about all the Google Adwords ad extensions here. If you need any help with Adwords ad extensions or anything to do with PPC advertising, please request a free. consultation.

Google Adwords Express for Dentists – A Good Idea Gone Bad

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Google Adwords Express is a simplified version of their advertising platform Google Adwords, aimed at local business and service professionals like dentists and orthodontists. The main benefit of Adwords Express for dentists is the automation and simplicity it offers over the default adwords campaigns. You can get started quickly and do not need professional to setup a Google Adwords Express campaign. Once you have specified a budget, bid, business category and created an ad, Google handles the rest. However, as we look a little deeper, we find that by removing the granular control over keywords and bids, Google has taken away the primary factors that make PPC advertising so effective.

Adwords Express for Dentists

If you are just testing the waters with ppc advertising and what to assess its performance quickly, Adwords Express may be right for you. However, if you are serious about PPC advertising and are willing to allocate a substantial amount of your marketing budget towards it then you must use the full Google Adwords account. Perhaps that is what Adwords Express is meant for – a stepping stone to Google’s full-fledged advertising program.

My main gripe is that Adwords Express will not produce the best ROI. Since most dentist who opt for this program do not have a big budget, they need a high ROI to justify increasing their spend. But if they do not hit right numbers, they may in fact be turned off by PPC advertising altogether. Then as a dental marketing company it becomes difficult for us to convince a dentist, who has had a bad experience with Adwords Express, that PPC advertising is worth doing.

The main reason why search advertising is so effective is because you can show your ad to qualified searchers only by bidding on selected keywords and excluding irrelevant searchers with negative keywords. This means at that a lot of wasted spend is saved and the campaign can be optimized over time as you gain a better understanding of your audience and expand your keyword list. However, in Adwords Express, you are at the mercy of Google’s algoritms as they decide which searcher is qualified to see your ad. You can only choose your service category eg. dentist. and then try to differentiate yourself with your ad. This can often result in a lot of wasted spend.

But, the worst part of Adwords Express is that you cannot do anything to optimize the campaign and to stop wasting money on unqualified clicks. This means that you will be continue to waste money on irrelevant clicks for as long as you are advertising as there is no negative keyword feature to stop your ad from appearing on irrelevant searches. This is where you lose the main advantage of PPC advertising and then it becomes a bit hit and miss like all other forms of advertising.

If you are considering Google Adwords Express, by all means do it but don’t be surprised if the results are ordinary. In that case do not blame search advertising because PPC advertising on Adwords Express is like a bird without wings.

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!