To grow a dental practice, you need to market and advertise online, as it’s where you are going to attract the majority of new patients. Competition is currently higher than it has ever been, with more dentist offices springing up all competing for the same patients.
Gaining exposure for your practice on Google is mandatory if you want to make it in today’s highly competitive market, both in the organic search results and the paid results. You need to attract highly qualified leads and convert them into new patients and appointments.
While SEO is great, and something you need to include in your dental digital marketing strategy, Google Ads allow you to instantly attract patients and generate high-quality leads for your dental practice.
The most attractive aspect of Google Ads for dental practices is the targeting options available, allowing you to only advertise to people in your specific area, and using keywords and search phrases that have a high likelihood of converting into a booked appointment.
Here are six simple, yet vital tips that will help you grow your dental practice through PPC, helping you to generate website traffic, leads, and new patients at a cost that allows you to continually scale your pay-per-click campaign to meet your acquisition goals.
1. Optimize for Demographic Targeting
There are several demographic targeting options available in Google Ads that will help you target potential dental patients. Some of these, include:
- Age: There are multiple age ranges you can target, but for dental patients, you will want to stick with 25-34, 35-44, and 45-54. These age ranges are adults capable of making their own decisions as well as the age demographics of users who are likely to look online when they need a dentist.
- Gender: Selecting between male, female, and unknown allows you to craft your message and ad copy accordingly.
- Parental Status: Targeting parents separately allows you to put special family offers in front of them. You can also run ads for childrens’ dental services and target the decision-makers – the parents.
- Household Income: Google’s income targeting allows you to target based on the percentile, i.e. Top 10% of income earners to Lower 50%. This is helpful if you are advertising cosmetic services such as teeth whitening, allowing you to target an audience more responsive to luxury services, whereas general teeth cleaning services would be better advertised to a broader audience.
The more accurate your targeting, the higher your click-through rates will be. This all contributes to your Quality Score, and the higher this score is, the more impressions your ads receive and the lower your CPC becomes.
2. Implement Google’s Call Extension Option
With such a large percentage of Google searches happening on mobile devices this allows your practice to quickly convert users into booked appointments almost immediately by implementing the call extension option.
Most dental appointments are booked on the phone, so if your ad copy is strong and your targeting is on-point you will see many prospects click your PPC ad’s “call” button to be directly connected with your dental practice.
This gives you an instant lead, completely bypassing having to convert the consumer into a phone call or form-submitted lead on your website. The user still has the opportunity to visit your website after the fact, but driving them to call your office on the spot gives you the best opportunity to create instant appointment bookings.
If you implement call extensions requires that you install call tracking tags on your website, which help you attribute conversion goals, like form submits and phone calls, to your ads. This helps you account for every marketing dollar spent, and optimize your dental office PPC campaign for the best possible results.
3. Bid on Location-Based Keywords
A dental practice relies on walk-ins and office visits. There is no Transaction unless a patient physically visits your office for an appointment. To attract local patients your Google Ads campaign needs to target location-based search terms.
This is the only way you are going to ensure your campaign produces the kind of results that enables large-scale scaling and growth. Terms like “teeth cleaning in Dallas” or “teeth whitening service in Cleveland” are location-based and will attract prospects that are valuable to your practice. Bidding on generic terms without any location intent will cause your cost-per-patient to be abnormally high.
Every aspect of your Google Ads click-to-conversion flow has a direct impact on your patient acquisition cost. Building targeted campaigns attract the highest quality traffic and click-through, which lowers your cost while giving your ads more exposure and clicks. Take the time to build your campaigns right, and the result will be a higher quality click at a lower cost.
4. Target Long-Tail Search Phrases for Voice Search
With voice search becoming more commonly used, it’s important to target keywords based on typical voice-related search queries. When it comes to finding a local dentist online, many voice searches will begin with “best” or end with “near me.”
For example, “best dentist in Atlanta,” or “dentist near me” would be seed phrases to build on, with an example of long-tail variations being “best teeth whitening dental office in Atlanta” and “dentist that does crown replacements near me.”
When you combine very specific keywords that are likely to be spoken during a voice search with specific geographical targeting you drastically improve the quality of your clicks and traffic. Your overall volume may decrease for these campaigns, but the impressions these ads receive will be from the highest quality prospect pool available.
For voice search specific ads, don’t worry so much about the impressions; instead, focus on the click-through and conversion rates for these campaigns. The best way to compile keyword ideas for voice search is to start with seed terms like shown in the example and then think out loud, putting yourself in the shoes of your target prospect. What natural voice queries are likely to be used? Long-tail terms generally have a low CPC, so take the time to build out these campaigns thoroughly and you may quickly find your highest converting ad sets.
5. Run a Call-Only Campaign Targeting Mobile Users
Want to convert nearly 100% of all clicks into phone call leads? With a call-only campaign you can target only mobile users and rather than the click taking the prospect to your dental website, they are connected to your practice right away.
Some searchers have a desire to speak to a dentist right away and have no interest in going to a website or filling out a form. These are prospects with an emergency or desire for immediate attention.
A very high percentage of these calls should be able to be converted into booked appointments during this first interaction. All inbound calls are routed through the Google Ads mobile app, so be sure to always have this device ready to be answered on the first ring. Prioritize inbound calls via Google Ads call-only campaigns and your appointment setting numbers will skyrocket.
6. Bid Higher on “Emergency” Dental Keywords
Potential patients with a dental emergency searching on Google are ready to find a solution to their problem, making keywords with emergency intent ones that you should consider bidding more aggressively on, as they convert at a much higher rate.
Keywords related to “fix cracked tooth,” “repair chipped tooth,” or “get tooth pulled” will convert at a high rate if your targeting is on point, so you can afford to bid slightly higher to get more exposure for your ad sets targeting these emergency keywords.
You can even take this a step further and implement a rule that bids even higher for these keywords on mobile devices. A search on a mobile device that includes emergency-related terms will often be looking for a solution immediately, resulting in clicking on the first result. A bid multiplier for mobile emergency searches can become an appointment booking goldmine.
Final Thoughts
A well-designed dental marketing campaign needs to include both organic and paid strategies, but there is no denying that pay-per-click advertising can deliver fast results. Not only that, but dental PPC campaigns are extremely measurable, allowing you to account for every penny spent and seeing how much each click, lead, and conversion costs.
This kind of data can be used to optimize the campaign, targeting the most cost-effective keywords, and not only increase the volume of traffic, leads, and patients but do so at an overall lower cost-per-action.
The tips above will help you run a more effective pay=per-click campaign for your dental practice, but it requires constant monitoring and optimization to meet or exceed your ROI goals. If you don’t have the time or resources to manage your dental PPC campaign internally we would be more than happy to explain how our fully managed service works.
Partnering with our agency to handle your Google Ads management allows you to allocated your time and resources to running your dental practice. Contact us today for a complimentary strategy session, and let our dental marketing experts review your current PPC campaign and explain how partnering with us can help take your results and growth to the next level.
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