How to Get to the Top of Google: Part 1 – Google Ads
Greetings!
Would you like to consistently attract new patients from Google?
Based on our patient surveys, the top two sources of new patients to your dental practice are patient referrals and Google. If people don’t know where to refer, they search on Google.
‘Over 90% of people use search engines, like Google, before making a purchase to research products and services locally.’
- BIA/Kelsey, 2015
When a person uses Google, they enter a ‘search query’ into the search box, which is the combination of words that they use to find what they’re looking for. For example, if a person is looking for a local dentist, they’ll likely use any of these search queries:
- Dentist near me
- Dentist [city]
- Downtown dentist
The results they get in Google vary depending on the keywords that are used. Keywords are the groups of words that trigger your website to be displayed in Google Ads, Maps or Search results. Sometimes the keywords might match your search query exactly, other times it’s a similar phrase match.
Once a user sees their search results in Google, they likely click on the first few websites and almost always on the first page. In fact, according to a study published by Advanced Web Ranking:
‘75% of all website clicks on Google are from the first page, and 33% are for the first website listing.’
If your dental website is not found on the first page of Google, your patients will have a hard time finding your practice. So, how do you get on the first page of Google?
When a person types a search query into Google, they see three results:
1. Google Ads: Pay Per Click
2. Google Maps: Local SEO
3. Google Search: Organic SEO
The results that you see in each of these three sections are based on completely different factors. In this 3-part guide, we’ll review how to get your dental website found on the first page of Google. Here’s what you’ll learn:
This Week – Google Ads: Pay Per Click
Google Ads for dentists are text, image, or video advertisements displayed by Google in their search engine results page, on websites and apps, as well as in Gmail or YouTube. Get your business website found on the first page of Google instantly using Google Ads, and use their powerful analytics to focus your ads to a specific audience of people interested in your dental services.
Next Week – Google Maps: Local SEO
Local search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of tactics to increase the position of your website ranking in local search results, such as Google Maps. Many people use Google Maps when looking for a new dental provider, so attract more patients to your dental clinic by increasing your rankings in Google Maps using local dental SEO for dentists.
Following Week – Google Search: Organic SEO
Organic search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of tactics to increase the position of your website ranking in organic Google Search results. Dental SEO for dentists often provides the best long-term value for growing your practice with new patients compared to paid advertising.
After reading this guide, you’ll understand how to grow your dental practice by being on the first page of Google. Let’s get started!
Google Ads: Pay Per Click
The primary benefit of using Google Ads is that you can get your dental website found on the first page of Google instantly. This attracts potential new patients to your website, wanting to learn more about your dental services.
Do Google Ads work? Do people click on Google Ads?
According to WordStream Research, when a person is looking on Google to make a purchase, 65% of all clicks are on Google Ads and only 35% are on organic Google Search.
In addition, there are also many other benefits of using Google Ads, such as:
- Return on investment: according to Google, for every $1 a business spends in Google Ads, they will earn an average return on investment of $2. In other words, if you spend $1,000 in Google Ads in one month, you may get new patients into your practice that will purchase an average of $2,000 in dental services, or more. These new patients may also return to your clinic for additional services, increasing your return on investment.
- Measurable analytics: traditional forms of marketing and advertising, such as television, radio, or direct mail (Canada Post) flyers, make it difficult to measure the performance of your campaign results. Google Ads provides extensive data analytics to measure every detail, including how many people view your ad, how many click on the ad to arrive at your website, and how many contact you to book an appointment.
- Audience focus: using Google’s extensive database of information, you can focus your ads to a very specific type of person based on their location, demographics, devices used, and the exact words that they use in their Google search query. Instead of wasting your marketing budget displaying ads to people who aren’t interested, focus your ads on people that are actively looking for your dental services (e.g. dental implants, Invisalign, dental surgery).
- Intent to buy: according to Unbounce, Google Ads visitors are 50% more likely to make a purchase than non-Google Ads visitors. In other words, when a person clicks on an ad, they often have a higher intention to make a purchase than when a person clicks on an organic search result. These Google Ads visitors are actively looking for a new product or service to purchase, and have a high “intent to buy”.
- First page instantly: any changes that you make to your website to increase your organic search engine rankings may take several weeks or months to make an impact to your results. With Google Ads, you can see your dental website on the first page of Google on the first day. Regardless of your business size, every website is competing on an equal playing field using Google Ads.
How to use Google Ads?
The first step is to setup a Google Ads account. First, visit the Google Ads homepage. Then, click on the button that reads: “Start Now”.
This takes you to Google’s sign-in page. Google uses one account for all of their products, including Google Ads, Analytics, Gmail, YouTube, and more. If you already have a Google account for any other product, type in your email address and password to login. If you don’t have a Google account setup, or if you want a separate account for Google Ads, click on the link below that reads: “Create account”.
Step 1: Define your goals
It’s important to set specific and measurable business goals to evaluate and improve your performance. An effective framework for goal-setting is creating S.M.A.R.T. goals, which helps you quantify your results so that you can measure your marketing return on investment (ROI).
Step 2: Know your audience
The next step in Google advertising is to imagine your existing or ideal patients. Imagine this ideal patient as one person with a name, age, gender, profession, etc. This is often called a “customer persona” or “patient avatar”. This exercise helps you imagine who your patients are, their demographics (age, gender, profession) and psychographics (interests, hobbies, lifestyles), as well as how your dental services can help them.
The key is to learn who your existing clients truly are and how you can find more clients like them. By learning about your clients, their challenges, and how they use Google, you can position your practice to deliver the right message, to the right audience, in a way that resonates with them.
A patient survey is an effective method of learning about your patients, their challenges and how they find dental providers. Instead of spending your advertising budget promoting your practice to people who aren’t interested in your services, focus your time and budget on finding the right people who are actively looking for your dental services.
Step 3: Know your competitors
In addition to knowing about your clients, you also want to know about your competitors. This helps you measure the success of your Google advertising campaigns relative to your industry. By comparing your performance metrics against industry averages, you can benchmark your results and determine how to improve your performance.
According to WordStream Research, the average Google Ads performance metrics for the health and medical industry are:
- Click-through-rate (CTR): 3.27%
- Conversion rate (CVR): 3.36%
- Cost-per-click (CPC): $2.62
- Cost-per-acquisition (CPA): $78.09
In other words, if 10,000 people view your Google Ad and your click-through-rate is 3.27%, then you’ll get 327 people to click on your ad to view your website landing page. If your conversion rate is 3.36%, that means that out of 327 people that arrive on your website, 11 will “convert” from a website visitor into a new client that books an appointment.
If your average cost-per-click is $2.62, to get 327 people to click on your ad will cost you $856.74. If you were able to get 11 new clients, then your average cost per acquisition is $77.89. In other words, it will cost you an average of about $78 to get one new client into your practice (based on these averages).
Step 4: Structure your account
Next, it’s important to decide how to structure your Google Ads account. How your account is structured will have an impact on your performance metrics, Google’s Quality Score, your cost-per-click (CPC), and your results.
Your Google Ads account is structured in a three-level hierarchy:
- Campaigns: organize your ads into campaign themes, based on how you want your budget allocated. If you want to allocate 50% of your budget into two different products, services, client types, or treatment options, then you want to have two different campaigns setup.
- Ad groups: these are held inside each campaign and can be used to focus on a specific audience segment. Each ad group contains its own set of keywords, ads, and website landing pages that your visitors will see.
- Ads: the advertisement that is triggered based on the keywords found in the ad group, which provides a link to your website landing page. You can test several different ads within each ad group to get the best results.
Step 5: Keyword research
Now that you have your account setup and properly structured, you’re ready to conduct keyword research. Keywords are the key words or phrases that people enter into Google’s search box to find a website. These keywords trigger your ads to be displayed. But, where do you find the keywords to use?
In your Google Ads dashboard, click on the “Tools” button in the top navigation bar. Then, under the section “Planning”, click on “Keyword Planner”. Selecting “Discover new keywords” helps you look at the average monthly search volume for all related keywords in your local market, city or province.
Once you’ve found 10-20 keywords that are similar to each other, you’ll want to place them inside the same ad group. This keeps your ads relevant to the audience segment that you’re focusing on. You’ll add the keywords when you create your ad group.
Step 6: Create campaign
After deciding on a list of keywords to use for each ad group, you’re ready to create your first Google Ads campaign. In your dashboard, click on the “Campaigns” tab on the left navigation bar. Then, click on the “+” button near the centre-left to create a “New campaign”. You can organize your campaign based on several goals, including:
- Sales: encourage sales online, by phone, or by visiting your clinic.
- Leads: encourage people to express interest by subscribing to a newsletter or providing their contact information.
- Website traffic: encourage people to visit your website.
- Product and brand consideration: educate people about what makes your products and services unique.
- Brand awareness and reach: introduce people to your company to increase their awareness of your products and services.
- App promotion: encourage people to download your mobile app.
These goals help Google provide recommended features and settings to help you attain your campaign goals.
Next, you’ll be asked to select a campaign type, which determines where people will see your ads displayed, including:
- Search: usually text-based ads displayed at the top of Google’s search engine results page.
- Display: usually image-based ads displayed on websites and apps that are part of Google’s Display Network of over 3 million websites.
- Shopping: text or image-based ads that promote your products.
- Video: short videos that are displayed before or during YouTube videos.
Finally, Google asks you to select how your campaign goals will be measured. In other words, what are the main actions that you want a person to take, including:
- Website visits
- Phone calls
- Store visits
- App downloads
Once you select your goals, Google will then ask you to setup your campaign. This includes your campaign name, the networks where your ad will be displayed (search or display), your audience focus, budget and bidding options, and other ad extensions.
Step 7: Setup ad groups
Once you’ve setup your campaign settings, you’ll want to create ad groups to focus your ads on a specific audience segment, or “customer persona”. You can segment your audience based on demographic and psychographic factors. For example, if you offer dental services for young adults and for seniors, you’ll want to create different ad groups that focus on your different audience segments. This ensures that your ads, keywords, and landing pages are all relevant to your specific audience segment.
This is the section that you’ll add the keywords that you researched earlier. Try to only use about 10-20 keywords for each ad group to ensure each ad is relevant and focused to each audience segment.
Your keywords can be triggered based on three categories:
- Broad match: this is the default match type for your keywords that triggers your ad to be displayed. This category triggers ads for your chosen keywords, as well as for any other similar keywords, including misspellings, synonyms, related searches, etc. This keyword category will trigger your ads to be displayed the most, increasing the total views (impressions) of your ads. But, it may not be relevant to the people searching.
- Phrase match: this keyword category triggers ads that match a phrase, or a close variation of that phrase, with additional words before or after. This keyword category will trigger less ads to be displayed than broad match, but will likely be more relevant and focused to your audience segment.
- Exact match: this keyword category triggers ads that match the exact search term or are close variations of that exact term. This keyword category will trigger your ads to be displayed the least, but will likely be the most relevant to your audience segment.
Step 8: Create ads
After setting up your ad groups, you’re finally ready to create your ads. First, enter the “Final URL”, which is the website landing page that you want people to view after clicking on your ad. So, how do you write compelling ads?
Successful Google Ads usually have three elements:
- Features: highlight the features of your dental practice, what makes your services unique, what makes your clinic different from your competitors, etc.
- Benefits: focus on the benefits that your dental services will have on your patients, and how those benefits are unique to your clinic.
- Call-to-action: the action that you want your audience segment to take after viewing your ad, such as: “call us today” or “visit our website to learn more”.
There are thousands of recommendations for how to write the most compelling ads. There is no one winning formula for all businesses, as each business and their clients are unique. The best Google Ads managers for dentists don’t take guesses, they take a scientific approach by testing everything. In other words, test different variations of headlines, descriptions, keywords, landing pages; then, collect data to evaluate which combination performs best.
Step 9: Design landing page
Now that you’ve created your ads and your audience is clicking on them, what do they see when they arrive at your website landing page?
Your website landing page is the first page that your visitors “land on” when they arrive to your website. According to the research agency, Nielsen Norman Group, on average, people will evaluate your web page in less than 10 seconds. In other words, you have 10 seconds to capture their attention and encourage them to explore the rest of your web page. If your web page loads slowly, or isn’t relevant to their search, they will click to go back to Google.
Many businesses make the mistake of sending Google Ads visitors to their home page, or to another landing page that isn’t relevant to their search. For example, imagine if you did a search in Google for “Invisalign benefits” and you read a Google Ad that has the description “Invisalign Features & Benefits”, so you click on the ad. Then, you arrive on a landing page that reads “General Dentistry Services”. Your first thought might be, “this web page isn’t what I’m looking for,” and you may click to go back to Google.
In order to keep your Google Ads visitors engaged with your web page, they have to be assured that your web page is relevant to their search and provides valuable information. Many experienced businesses will create a separate website landing page for each Google Ads campaign that they conduct. This ensures complete relevancy for each audience segment.
Step 10: Analyze and optimize
Once you’ve launched your campaign, you’ll want to monitor the performance of the campaign regularly. Google provides a tracking code or tag that you can embed on your landing page to track user behaviour on your web page, including session duration, button and link clicks, form completions and more. Install this tracking code on your landing page to get the most comprehensive data on your dental ads performance.
Compare your campaign performance to industry averages to benchmark your results. Then, test everything that you can. Try to maintain all variables consistent and only test one variable at a time. This helps you determine the best combination of headlines, descriptions, keywords, landing pages, etc.
Conclusion
Dental Google Ads for dentists is easy to learn, but challenging to master. Although it’s relatively easy to create an account and launch your ads, it’s far more challenging consistently getting a positive return on investment. You have to ensure you’re collecting and analyzing data to optimize your results and minimize losing your ads budget to inefficient campaigns.
If you have any questions or need any help, feel free to contact me directly. I read and respond to every email. All the best in growing your dental practice!
Sarkis Hakopdjanian
President | Optiimus
(587) 409 5990 | (833) 409 0979
sarkis@optiimius.ca
