Why Should You Use Google Ads as a Dental Clinic?
But wait a second there: why should you even bother with Google Ads? Can’t you just use other digital marketing methods like SEO (search engine optimization) and SMM (social media marketing)?
Well, yes, you can. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should: after all, the best marketing strategy is using as many marketing methods as possible together. This holistic, omnichannel approach almost 100% guarantees that you’ll see returns from your marketing strategy.
Google Ads should be an essential part of your overall marketing strategy. And this is for many reasons—all of which point to the fact that Google Ads are worth investing in. These reasons would include the following:
- Quick Results: Google Ads delivers results relatively quickly, in marketing terms. While other marketing channels require months to see tangible results, Google Ads brings results in as little as a week.
- Refined Targeting: with Google Ads, you have the ability to really refine who your intended audience is, meaning that your ads are only displayed to the people that are most interested in what you offer.
- Precise Data Tracking: every client you gain from your paid ads is tracked on Google Ads; that way, you have an easy way of tracking the performance of your ads and measuring the results gained from them.
These are only a few of the many benefits offered by Google Ads.
If you’re interested in using Google Ads for your marketing and would like to understand better how it can help you grow your business, contact us and we’ll explain while also providing you with a personalized quote for our services.
How to Choose a Google Ads Agency for Dentists
In order to choose a dental PPC agency that is a right fit for your needs you need to choose the best Google Ads agency out there—anything less won’t get you the results you need.
Needless to say, choosing one agency over another is not a simple matter at all: there are many considerations that you need to keep in mind as well as a lot of research that needs to be undertaken.
While we can simply be biased and tell you that you ought to choose us over the other agencies (not that that’s a bad idea…), we’re going to explain a few pointers that you should bear in mind in order to make the best decision when choosing a Google Ads agency for your dental practice.
- Firstly, you need to make sure that the agency you’re contacting is absolutely legitimate and has a proven track record of successfully managed ad campaigns. You can do this by checking reviews, testimonials, etc.
- Secondly, you might want to ask whether the agency has any expertise in the dental industry and how it’s marketed on Google ads. This isn’t absolutely necessary as any agency can be up to the task, but agencies that are more familiar with the industry would generally produce quicker results.
- Thirdly, once you’re convinced that a marketing firm is genuine, you ought to contact them for more information about your services. Check how willing they are to offer a custom solution for your requirements. Stay away of agencies that try to sell you more than you need.
- Finally, get a feel for how they communicate, how open they are about their procedures, how transparent they are about pricing, etc. Essentially, an agency should be able to explain everything to you in a way that you can understand so that you have an idea of what you’re paying for.
We believe that we have what it takes to be your Google Ads agency of choice. Not only are we totally legitimate and can cater to your needs by providing your with personalized solutions and strategies, but we also have experience in a wide variety of industries.
Moreover, we continuously report on the progress of your ad campaigns and ensure that everything is above board, so to speak, through constant communication.
Google Ads Management for Dentists
But what do we exactly do to make your business grow through the use of this marketing method?
Well, our process involves many steps, which we’ll explain to you in greater detail when you contract us. However, we’re going to give you an idea of what exactly we do; that way, you won’t be calling us with no clue of what our services consist of.
Identifying Your Ideal Customer
Before we even get to setting up your Google Ads account and campaigns, first we’ll have a strategization session with you.
In this session we’ll discover what your marketing goals ultimately are, or what you hope to achieve through the use of Google Ads, what your services consist of, and other similar processes.
Once we have identified you ideal clients, we’ll create buyer personas, which are like semi-fictional characters that represent what your ideal kinds of customers are like. Sure, you can argue that everyone requires dental services and this process can be skipped—but not every dentist wants to attract the same sort of clients.
Moreover, by identifying different sorts of people in need of dental services, we can bear in mind the kind of language we should use when creating the ad copy, and so on.
Understanding Your Best Keywords
Arguably one of the most important steps in the entire process, and that’s finding the keywords that will make most sense for your business, will drive you the most traffic, and will fit in with your budget.
Using the right keywords is a powerful strategy as not only will we be targeting the right kinds of customers, but we’ll also be able to find keywords that are great opportunities to display your ads.
For instance, keywords that are specific to your location, or keywords that have a good amount of search volume but not a lot of competitions, or keywords that are looking for your exact services are all golden opportunities. Once we have compiled a list of keywords, we’ll arrange them by keyword match types in order to maximize the potential from each keyword.
Finally, we will also create a list of negative keywords—keywords where you don’t want your ads to be displayed. These are imperative in order to avoid wasting precious ad budget, especially on keywords that are not relevant for you.
Explaining the Costs & Estimating a Budget
Since Google Ads requires continuous payment, it’s always best to estimate what a good budget is early on as this would guarantee a sustainable PPC strategy.
You don’t want to incur too many costs when marketing your services, as that won’t make any sense for your business. At the same time, you cannot commit to too low of a budget as that won’t bring you any real results, meaning that it’s still money wasted.
There is a certain amount that you should spend on Google Ads in order to see actual results. Together, we can figure out what your ideal budget is by understanding your unique financial situation, the kind of costs that are regularly incurred in your industries, and how much you should ideally spend in order to see results.
Of course, budgets can change during the duration of our work, depending on your financial concerns. We commit to continuously being transparent regarding our use of your ad budget.
Choosing the Best Campaign Types for Your Needs
There are many forms of Google Ads, each one with its own features, pros and cons. As a dentist, not every form of Google Ads will help you achieve your marketing goals. In fact, we believe that the following forms of Google Ads will help you the most:
- Search ads: one of the most recognizable forms of Google Ads, these are the sponsored listings that you can find at the top of the search results page whenever you do a Google search.
- Display ads: these are the banners that you generally find on the websites you visit; the websites will be part of the Google Display Network, a network of websites that sell spaces to Google for ads to be displayed.
- Local ads: these are ads that you’ll find when you do a search on Google Maps; Google local service ads for dentists are generally very effective as they allow dental clinics to be placed at the top of the listings on Google Maps.
- Video ads: these are ads that you will generally find when watching a video on YouTube; however, some video ads can also be shown as display ads.
We suggest making full use of all of these forms of Google Ads in order to maximize your outreach and gain as many clients as possible.
Supercharging Your Ads with Extensions
Having plain old ads being displayed isn’t going to cut it in this day and age, especially when the competition in nearly every industry is so stiff and CPCs are continuously rising. Therefore, we should use every tool at our disposal to make our ads as attractive as possible.
This is where ad extensions come in: these are free add-ons that you can attach to your ads to make them more attractive. When it comes to Google Ads for dental clinics, the ad extensions that matter the most are the following:
- Call extensions: with this extension, you’re essentially tacking on your phone number to the ad so that customers can instantly call you when pressing on the ad.
- Location extensions: all dentist clinics are physical locations, and this extension shows where you’re situated; that way, clients can get directions to your business.
- Sitelink extensions: this is an extension that allows you to display more links from your website on the ad; it’s useful if you want to advertise the range of services you have which are explained on other pages.
- Seller ratings extensions: since dentists work largely on patients’ trust, displaying your reviews front and center can help you gain new ones easily: that’s where this extension comes in since it displays a five-star scale aggregated from third-party sites.
Through the smart use of these extensions, we can make your ads far more attractive, helping your gain more potential clients.
Landing Pages That Shine
Of course, it’s not only your customers’ teeth that need to shine—your landing page must also have a lovely set of pearly whites in order to impress visitors!
And that’s because Google Ads doesn’t simply stop at showing users attractive ads: whenever a user clicks on an ad, they’ll be sent to a landing page, and that’s where you need to convince them to become a customer.
If the visitor sees an unprofessional landing page or has an awful experience through slow loading times, they won’t be convinced any time soon.
Therefore, we take great pains in order to craft beautiful landing pages that load quickly and optimized to work smoothly across all sorts of devices, so that they both look good and feel good.
Remarketing for Dentists with Google Ads
An often underused tactic, remarketing is when you display your adverts again to people who have already interacted with your ads before. The power of these ads is that those remarketed users are already familiar with your brand, products, and services, and so may be more willing to engage with your business again in the future.
As you might well know, not every user will immediately become a client simply by either seeing your ad for the first time or even by having clicked on it in the past.
Real-Time Reporting
Knowing how your ads are performing is important to understand what impact Google Ads are having on your business—if there is any impact at all.
This will help you make rational, data-based decisions of whether you would like to continue investing in Google Ads, whether to maintain the same budget, or even whether to increase the budget in order to receive even more positive results.
Moreover, understanding how your ads are performing is also important so as to know if you’re reaching your marketing goals or how far you are from reaching them. By identifying KPIs (key performance indicators) that matter most to your goals, you’ll be able to understand how close you are to reaching these goals.
For this reason, we provide you with regular reports on the state of your paid ads; furthermore, we try to optimize our reports in order to be as uncluttered as possible, to facilitate quick and efficient understanding.
By cutting down on marketing jargon and simplifying the data to only the data points that only matter to you, we provide brief reports that serve as easy-to-understand snapshots of how your advertising is going.
Continuous Optimization
We can’t stop at simply creating your ads and landing pages: we have to continuously optimize your paid ads in order to guarantee that we’re gaining as much value from them as we possibly can.
Through A/B testing, we try to identify which versions of your landing pages perform the best and use those to drive even more conversions than before.
We also try and see where to invest your ad budget best by continuously checking which keywords are generating most clicks and conversions, and investing more in those.
In other words, we’ll continuously work on your ads so that we can gain the most value out of your ad budget. This allows us to deliver better ROI and ROAS (return on investment and return on ad spend respectively) for you.
What Is Google Ads?
Are you unsure what Google Ads is and how it works? Not to worry: let’s give you a brief overview of the platform.
First of all, Google Ads is Google’s very own paid advertising platform; in other words, you’re directly paying Google for them to present your advertisements across their various platforms.
There are multiple forms of Google Ads, with each form being displayed in different locations across Google’s network. For instance, search ads, one of the most popular form of Google Ads, are displayed at the top of the search results page when doing a Google search. In other words, these are the sponsored listings you see at the top of the results.
Other popular forms include display ads, which are the banners that you see on certain websites that are part of the Google Display Network, and video ads, which are the advertisements that you often see on YouTube.
Finally, Google Ads works on an auction basis: essentially, marketers bid on keywords much like how people bid in auctions. What they’re bidding is basically the maximum amount they’re willing to pay for a click on a keyword.
However, other than paying for clicks, marketers can pay for 1000 impressions (or times people saw an ad) or per engagement (a predetermined action with an ad). Choosing one or the other will depend on one’s marketing goals.
Dentist Advertising Guidelines
The advertising and marketing guidelines for dentists are dictated by the American Dental Association (ADA for short) and are written down in the ADA Principles of Ethics and Code of Conduct (or the “ADA Code” for short).
All of the rules and guidelines regarding advertising and marketing for dental professionals can be found under the articles “5.D.2. MARKETING OR SALE OF PRODUCTS OR PROCEDURES” and “5.F. ADVERTISING“.
To summarize: the rules essentially state that PPC for dentists and other marketing channels, like SEO, are perfectly acceptable, so long as the material presented is truthful and doesn’t break the client-patient trust that’s an integral part of the practice.
Moreover, all advertisements should present all the possible information related to a particular product and service, and dentists must also verify the veracity of the claims of any of the products they advertise.
Are Dentists Allowed to Advertise?
According to the ADA code, dentists are well within their rights to advertise. Therefore, you shouldn’t be worried about making use of PPC ads for dentists and other similar services.
However, the only caveat to this is that the code states that “no dentist shall advertise or solicit patients in any form of communication in a manner that is false or misleading in any material respect.” In other words, you cannot be deceitful in your marketing as this would go against dentistry ethics.
It’s easy to understand why and how misleading advertising is frowned upon. At the same time, misleading advertising goes against Google’s advertising policies, which would be further reason to remain truthful in your advertising.
FAQs
Does Google Ads work for dentists?
Yes, Google Ads is a fantastic marketing strategy for dentists! Offering relatively quick results, a lot of control on how your budget is spent, and highly refined targeting options, you don’t have to wait months or years to see returns for your dental business.
How do I get Google Ads results for dentists?
If you want to see improvements in your Google Ads, you could contract a Google Ads agency like us to take care of the work for you. Of course, our services come with a fee. However, in exchange, you’ll be receiving a service that requires months to learn and years to master, and also saves you a lot of time.
On the other hand, if you’re concerned about cutting costs as much as possible, you can actually manage your own Google Ads campaigns, but you need to be prepared to invest a lot of your time in setting up the account, performing keyword research, and so on. At the same time, you need to also learn how to actually use the Google Ads platform.
If you’re prepared to do that, then by keeping the best practices for Google Ads in mind, you should be on your way to PPC victory.
How do I advertise myself as a dentist?
There are many ways that you can advertise your services as a dentist, and as we have seen, Google Ads is one of these marketing methods. However, you don’t need to be constrained to simply using Google AdWords for dentists: you can use other marketing strategies, like SEO and even physical marketing like flyers.
How do I increase my Google reviews for dentists?
There are many ways that you can increase the number of reviews you have on Google. One of the simplest ways of doing so is simply by asking your customers to leave a review. Otherwise, you can leave a link to where they should write the review when communicating with your patient by email, for example.