Advertising in any sort of medical field is tricky. You don’t want your potential clients thinking you don’t have enough current patients, nor that you’re more focused on getting new clients than providing quality care.
At the same time, you need to nurture referrals, build your practice, and grow your clinic’s outreach. So how do you get new patients while walking that thin “medically appropriate” line?
You use Google Ads, but in a way that aligns with your clinic’s values and your patient’s expectations. Still asking, what is Google Adwords and how to use it?
We’ve got an all-levels guide below.
What is Google Adwords?
Google Adwords is Google’s advertising platform. Setting up an ad is easy, but you have to know the ins and outs of Google’s system to succeed.
If you have lots of time on your hands, you can go through Google’s free training (or you can pay someone, like us, to do all this for you).
They determine when to run which ads depending on what they call a “search query.” That search is anything a potential patient, in this case, Googles, in relation to dental care.
It decides who gets the top spot or spots based on keywords, how much you’re willing to pay, and more general factors, like the quality of your website.
Example
Let’s say you run a dental clinic in Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s a good-sized city, so we can assume there’s healthy competition.
If a Cincinnati clinic wanted to run an ad, first, they’d think about what kind of new patients they want. Are they looking for people who are unhappy with their current dental care?
People who just moved to the area and need a new dentist? Or families with kids, people who need braces, etc.
Then they’d ask themselves (and tools online) what kind of searches that group of people do.
Someone with kids is more likely to google “family-friendly dentist Cincinnati,” while someone unhappy with their current care would search something like, “highly rated dentists near me.”
If you want your clinic to come back on the results page under those search terms, you need to use targeted keywords.
Search vs. Display Ads
Once you know who you want to target and what you want your ads to say, you need to decide where you want people seeing these ads.
Google gives you a choice between their search network (classic search results) and their display network, which involves advertising on Google-friendly sites, like YouTube, and on other places around the web.
Benefits of Google Ads
All of this sounds like a lot of work, and you’re likely wondering if it’s worth it. Is it? If you do it correctly, yes.
Knowing which people to target and what keywords (search query text) to use can be the difference between getting 10 or 200 new patients a month, depending on the population in your area.
And while your conversions are partially population-based (we can’t create NYC-level leads in a small town in Iowa), your success also depends on the quality of your ads, how well you maintain them, and the way you follow up.
About the Author
Florian Tomko is the founder of Profitable Dentistry, a digital marketing company that focuses on SEO and Google Ads for dentists. After learning his craft at a top rated agency, Florian moved in-house to grow his father’s dental practice in Germany and an ambitious dental clinic in a very competitive market in a European capital.
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