May 30, 2019
Drive More Clients to Your Dental Practice with Google Ads
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There are more than 23,000 general and specialty dental practices in New Jersey and New York combined. The average number of residents per practice in both the states, for both types of practices, is way below the national average. Competition is intense, and advertising is a must for dental practices that want to stay busy.
Formerly AdWords, Google’s industry-leading pay-per-click advertising platform is the obvious first choice. Google Ads shows your ads to people who’re searching for dental services using the keywords you have selected for the campaign. You pay only for the clicks and not for the ad impressions.
Advertising on Google Ads offers many advantages for dentists. You know exactly how many people saw your ad and how many of them clicked on it. By setting up conversion tracking, you can find out if those who clicked the ad booked appointments and visited your clinic. You can also control the budget and your campaign with tons of customization options that Google Ads contains.
The following strategies work best for dentists advertising on Google.
Bid on location keywords such as dentist morris county or essex county dentist depending upon your location and service areas.
The search volumes are likely to be negligible for such keywords, but the CPC (Cost per Click) is also likely to be low. These are high-intent searches so that you can drive high-quality leads at lower costs. And most people go to dentists near them.
Google will pick up your location, phone numbers, working hours, and reviews from Google My Business. So, make sure to review and verify the information in your Google My Business account before bidding on local keywords.
People with dental emergencies are likely to search for urgent or emergency keywords such as urgent tooth extraction or root canal emergency. The number of such searches might be very small, but the buying intent is extremely high and the CPC is likely to be low.
AdWords allows you to target your ads based on the demographic information of users. The new Google Ads experience includes the following demographic targeting options:
Demographic VariableTargeting OptionsAge"18-24," "25-34," "35-44," "45-54," "55-64," "65 or more," and "Unknown"Gender"Female," "Male," and "Unknown"Household Income“Top 10%,” “11-20%,” “21-30%,” “31-40%,” “41-50%,” “Lower 50%,” and “Unknown”Parental Status*"Parent," "Not a parent," and "Unknown"
*The Parental Status demographic is available for Google Ads Display and Video campaigns only.
A dentist should use these options to refine targeting and run more effective campaigns. For example, you can target high-income groups if you’re offering expensive dental procedures. A dentist promoting pediatric dentistry can target the ads toward parents, and so on.
Better targeting prompts more people to click on your ad. It makes your ad more relevant and improves your Google Ads Quality Score, which means you can drive traffic at lower CPC.
Phone calls are still the most commonly used method to book dentist appointments. You can provide a click-to-call functionality using the Google Ads Call Extension. Users will see a clickable call button that allows them to call your clinic directly. They also have the option to click the ad and visit your website or landing page.
Most Google searches now take place on mobile. Call-only ads only appear during mobile searches and don’t link to websites--but they make phone calls for searchers with a simple touch. You can run call-only campaigns to target hurried mobile customers who don’t want to waste time clicking and browsing.
We prefer to use the call extension because it gives your customers more information about your practice and services while also allowing them to call your office with the tap of a button.
Showing your search ads on Google Maps is an excellent way to attract customers who are already on the road looking for a dentistry practice near them.
Enabling Google Maps ads places your dentistry on top of organic results. A clickable call button and directions button make the call and find directions to your clinic with a single tap.
To show ads on Google Maps, you need to enable the location extensions in your Google Ads account. You should also select location based bidding and target local keywords if you want to more traffic at less cost.
By 2020, 50 percent of all internet searches will be voice-based. More than 15 percent of voice queries contain one of the following three trigger keywords:
Trigger KeywordCount% of TotalHow658,9768.64%What382,2245.01%Best200,2062.63%
Voice queries for dental services generate high-intent long-tail keywords like:
“where to get dental implants union county new jersey”
“what does teeth whitening cost” or
“best dental clinic in manhattan”
The search volume of such long-tail key phrases may be low, but they bring in high quality leads ready to convert into clients.
Brainstorm a list of long-tail key phrases that your prospective clients are likely to voice-search and bid on those keywords to drive low cost, high-quality customer traffic.
A dental practice is a strictly local business. According to research, the number of conversions reduces dramatically as the distance of the search from the clinic increases.
Advertising for dentists will be more profitable if they can show more ads to people near them and tapper off the display frequency as the searches move further away from their clinics.
Google Ads allows you to control the distance where your ads are shown using bid adjustments. You can bid high for nearby locations and reduce bids gradually as the searches move away from your clinic.
The bid adjustments apply to several other targeting options including device, location, ad scheduling, and demographics, among other options.
Josh Meah takes advantage of all the relevant Google Ads features to increase clinic visits significantly and continuously reduce advertising costs.
Unless you’re using call-only ads, you need a landing page for each ad or Ad Group, depending upon how you have planned your campaign.
The landing page should provide ad-specific information and a clear call to action (CTA). The CTA for a dentist will either be to make a call or to schedule an appointment, for which you need to integrate an appointment scheduling tool with the landing page.
You can use one of the appointments scheduling plugins for WordPress to display your schedule and show empty slots where visitors can book appointments. Going a step further, you can integrate the appointment register with email marketing to send appointment reminders to customers opting in to receive them.
Booking Calendar is a popular free plugin to provide appointment booking functionality on your landing page.
It’s also important to provide click-to-call functionality on the mobile version of the landing page for visitors who’d like to call your practice.
Customer reviews, clinic and staff photos and videos, great copywriting, and a clean and clear layout are some of the things that improve the conversion rates.
Google Ads is touted as a DIY advertising platform. As you can see, however, there’s more to it than meets the eye. You might not be able to achieve the best results if you don’t take care of hundreds of tiny details that impact Google Ads revenues and cost.
JoshMeah.com specializes in PPC advertising for dentists and can keep your bookings calendar full while delivering a phenomenal return on investment.
Call or email us today for a free consultation about growing your dental practice using Google Ads and other forms of digital advertising.
The art is building the right growth campaign. The science is in the results.
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