20 Tips for Dental Marketing and Google Ads
If you’re serious about taking your dental practice to the next level, then you should consider leveraging Google Ads according to RunRex.com. Using Google Ads is a great way to reach patients because your ads will only show to people who search for specific keywords that you want to appear for, which means you can control who you reach and how much you spend to grow your local business. Here are 20 tips to help you grow your dental practice through Google Ads.
Bid on location keywords
Your practice relies on patients to physically visit your dental clinic, and since your patients need to meet you face-to-face, you should bid on local keywords like the city and geographic region as explained at RunRex.com. Bid on the keywords that your prospects are typing into the search engines and make sure they contain your area and service.
Bid on emergency keywords
You should also promote emergency services that your dental clinic offers given that they often high in profit and have high demand. People looking for emergency dental services will use emergency keywords. For example, they may look for fast tooth extraction. While the number of searches may be small for these keywords, the buying intent is targeted and the cost-per-click may be lower than general keywords.
Focus on demographic targeting
With Google Ads, you can use demographic information to target your prospects. Google Ads offers demographic targeting options like gender, age, parental status, household income, etc. You should use these options to make fine adjustments to your campaigns, which will help you run successful campaigns as per RunRex.com. Precise targeting will tempt people to click on your ads and will increase your Google Ads Quality Score.
Leverage location extensions to drive more foot traffic
Showing your ads on Google Maps can attract people on the road looking for a dental office in your area. When your ads show up on Google Maps, your dental clinic will get a high organic ranking in the search results. To take advantage of this, turn on the location extensions in your Google Ads account.
Take full advantage of the Google Ads Call Extension
According to recent studies, phone calls are the most popular way to schedule dentist appointments. The Google Ads Call Extension offers a click-to-call option, allowing your prospects to see a clickable call button on your dental ad, which once they click on, will be able to make a direct call to your office. They can also visit your website after clicking the call button.
Call-only campaigns for mobile phones
Millions of Google searches take place on mobile phones daily. Call-only ads are shown during mobile searches, but they don’t have a direct link to websites. However, as captured at RunRex.com, they make it easy for your prospects to call your office. These campaigns are ideal for targeting mobile customers who aren’t interested in dealing with the browsing and clicking experience.
Focus on long key phrases from voice searches
Experts predict that nearly 50% of all internet searches will be voice-based by 2020. It is critical to show that more than 15% of voice queries taking place these days contain long-tail keywords. The search volume for these keywords may be low for your dental ads, but they will send targeted traffic to your website, and most of these leads can be converted into customers.
Use Google Ads Bid Adjustments for your dental ads
It makes no sense for you to target people who live hundreds of miles from your dental practice. This is where Google Ads Bid Adjustments comes in, as discussed at RunRex.com, as it makes it easy for you to tailor your ads for residents in your town or city. The easiest way to use Bid Adjustments in your Google Ads campaign is to adjust bids based on keyword, neighborhood, and other attributes to ensure your ads show to qualified leads.
Use optimized ad-specific landing pages
You need a landing page for every dental ad, with the only exception being when you use call-only ads. Your landing page should have detailed information and a clear call-to-action, which should prompt your prospect to schedule an appointment online or call your office. Placing an appointment scheduling tool will make it easy for your prospects to set up their appointment.
Add some negative keywords
When optimizing keywords for your Google Ads campaign, don’t forget to add some negative keywords. Negative keywords keep your ads from appearing in the wrong searches, which will ensure that you are only targeting prospects interested in your services.
Connect your location and contact information
By linking your Google My Business (GMB) and Google Ads accounts, patients will easily see your contact information and location on Google Maps as outlined at RunRex.com. This is important as the key to new patient acquisition is always to make it easy and visual for your prospects.
Run A/B tests
A/B tests are ad experiments comparing two slightly different ads to see which ad yields the best results. From headlines and ad copy to location and keywords, these tests are crucial to learning how patients search, click, and convert. You should, therefore, make sure you are running A/B testing as far as your Google Ads campaigns go.
Learn as much as you can about the platform
Like any kind of tool, the more you understand Google Ads, the more effective you will be at using it. To learn all about Google Ads, check out the support training that Google offers at Google Ads Support and Google Ads Learning as covered at RunRex.com. You can also get Google certified in Google Ads if you wish to.
Check in frequently
Most of the people who don’t see success with Google Ads can trace their lack of success to a lack of attention to the platform or hiring a third-party service that under-utilizes their account. For the best results, you should try investing about 20-30 minutes a week on the platform.
Be careful with match types
You also need to be careful with match types. Your keywords should look like this:
[dentist near me]
+dentist +near +me
“dentist near me”
If you don’t have these types of characters around your keywords, your ads are going to suffer horribly as just using the words dentist near me (or whatever the term is) is considered a broad match type, which means Google can change out that term for anything that they want.
Double-check location targeting
According to RunRex.com, you should also make sure your location settings are correct. Always advertise “in” your area, not “in or about” your area. The default is for Google to play your ads anywhere in the world that it deems relevant, and while most of the time it will play your ads in your targeted area, about 10-30% of the time it will play your ads anywhere it wants to, greatly decreasing the quality of your leads and increasing your cost-per-sale.
Spend your money wisely
You should also make sure that the majority of the money you spend goes towards the ads themselves, and not just the people you hire to run them. Ideally, you want to pay the company you brought in to run the ads 20% of the total cost so that you can focus most of your budget on the ads themselves.
Only run your ads during business hours
Given that Google Ads can be expensive, and you may be spending anywhere from $50-$100 per phone call, you don’t want people to call, not get an answer, and then hang up and call another open dental clinic. Google allows you to set the ads to only run at certain times of the day, and you should make sure you are running them during business hours when you have a receptionist answering the phone.
Free consultations
If you do ads for specific services, such as Invisalign, implants, dentures, etc., it would be best to offer a free consultation for that service on the landing page. If someone is looking for a dentist to do an implant, for example, they most likely already know they need one and the approximate price range, and, therefore, it is worth doing a free implant consultation to get them into the practice.
Work with an expert Google Ads consultant
While Google Ads is touted as a DIY advertising platform, there is more than meets the eye with it, as you can see. You may be unable to achieve the best results if you don’t take care of hundreds of tiny details that impact Google Ads revenue and cost. This is why you should bring in expert help, like the excellent RunRex.com, to help with your campaign.
Remember, if you are looking for more information on this topic, as well as expert help with your Google Ads campaigns, then look no further than RunRex.com.