You’ve been on the internet; you know just how crowded it is. How are medical providers supposed to cut through the clutter and reach potential patients?
If you’re looking to build your medical business, you’ll want your website to appear front and center when potential patients are Googling for the types of services you offer. One of the fastest and easiest ways to do this is with online advertising.
Pay-per-click or PPC, online advertising campaigns are one of the most popular and effective ways to drive new patients to your website. It works just as its name implies: You pay for each click on your online ad. You don’t pay each time the ad shows up, but rather every time someone is interested enough to actually click on your ad to find out more about you. Search engine ads can provide some of the highest return on investment (ROI) when it comes to marketing for doctors.
The Cost of Google PPC Ads
The cost of Google PPC ads can vary dramatically, depending on the keywords you are targeting. How it works is that you place a bid on the keywords (which are words or short phrases) that most closely match your services and what your patients are likely to Google. This provides your medical practice the opportunity of showing up at the top of Google search results, which alone is the reason for it to be included in any healthcare marketing strategy.
The average PPC cost is just $1 to $2 per click. This clearly benefits you because you pay mere dollars for a website visit that can help new patients find you – patients who may keep coming to you for many years.
Benefits of PPC Campaigns
The healthcare marketing pros at iHealthSpot Interactive can help you create a targeted PPC campaign designed to meet your specific goals. No matter your healthcare specialty, medical practices and related businesses stand to benefit in numerous ways from incorporating PPC campaigns into their healthcare marketing strategy, including that it can help you:
- Cost-efficiently grow your patient base
- Target a specific service of yours or a health condition you treat
- Target patients living in a specific geographic area
- Measure the success of your campaign – to make future edits or justify the advertising expense
- Control how much you spend on each ad
How Google Ads Work
No doubt you’ve heard of “Google Ads,” which are this search engine’s pay-per-click (PPC) marketing solution. The platform sells PPC ads to people who want to advertise their business or their product. Millions of businesses around the world use Google Ads. So, how do they work?
With every search query, Google chooses from among its advertisers to display ads in the top three positions of search results. The ads that are shown depend on (1) the quality and relevance of your ad campaign, (2) the keywords selected, and (3) the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for those keywords. Collectively, these factors make up your “ad rank,” a metric that healthcare marketing professionals can help you improve.
It doesn’t help that healthcare marketing is a crowded, competitive field. Make sure you have marketing experts on your side to guide you through the process. At iHealthSpot Interactive, our digital marketing specialists can help you with keyword research, the creation of enticing ad copy, and the optimization of your web page’s quality – all of which can significantly improve your chances of appearing at the top of your next patient’s search results.
Common Goals for PPC Campaigns
In order to craft effective paid search marketing for doctors, we will need to know what you hope to accomplish. This may range from simple brand awareness for new medical practices, to increasing your visibility in a new or widened geographic region, to generating new leads for a specific service you offer. PPC medical campaigns, or paid search marketing for doctors, is ideal when you want to be the leader within a particular field and region.
Also, if your website hasn’t been updated in a while – and it may not be sufficiently optimized to get you organic (unpaid) web traffic – a PPC campaign can help fill in the gaps until you’re able to improve the quality of your site’s search engine optimization (SEO). You might consider PPC campaigns a type of booster shot to your healthcare marketing plan.
The target audience and keywords you target in a PPC campaign can be changed, depending on your needs. At iHealthSpot Interactive, we work closely with the medical practices we serve to ensure that you are getting the most bang for your advertising buck. We can help you identify the types of keywords that might be most successful for you. For example, the more specific and less common your keywords are, the cheaper the PPC ad campaign may be for you.
Turning an Online Visitor Into a Patient
No matter your advertising goals, you’ll want to encourage those who click on your PPC ad to do something once they’re on your site. This is what is referred to as a call-to-action. It can be as simple as providing a clickable phone number or an appointment-request button that’s easy for them to see. This is what helps turn paid search marketing for doctors into real, tangible results for your medical business. Click-to-call ads, in particular, can be especially beneficial to tracking leads from your PPC campaign.
The vast majority of consumers search via Google for their healthcare needs. We can help make sure that your practice shows up when and where your patients are looking for you.
Trust the PPC Pros at iHealthSpot Interactive
We have been helping practices like yours succeed in the digital marketplace since 2007. Our website development and healthcare marketing teams excel at understanding your business – and how exactly to help you stand out from the crowd online. We can help develop paid search marketing for doctors that not only accomplishes your immediate marketing goals but is something you can continue to build upon in future advertising.
Contact the PPC experts at iHealthSpot Interactive for a free quote today. Call us at (877) 709-0999 and find out just how easy paid search marketing for doctors can be.
