The Hidden Benefits of Paid Search Marketing

Feb 21, 2017 | Marketing

When we talk about the benefits of paid search marketing, the first thing practices think about is obtaining new leads and getting these new leads at a low cost-per-conversion compared to other marketing mediums. Although these metrics are critical for practices, we also want to look beyond this data and talk about some of the hidden benefits that a paid search campaign can have for your practice.

Reach Areas Outside Your City

If you are a practice that wants to reach new patients outside the actual city you are located in, it can be difficult to do so with local organic search listings.

local search result

The reason for this is that one of the biggest search ranking factors for local search engine optimization (SEO) is the actual location of the searcher and the practice itself. If your practice is located in Vancouver, Wash., and you are trying to reach patients in neighboring cities like Camas or Battle Ground, it is going to be difficult for your practice to compete with clinics physically located in those cities. Search engines will want to show practices that are actually located in those cities for their organic search results.

Paid search marketing will allow practices to target potential patients in the exact locations they want to reach. There are several ways you can target patients by location, including by ZIP code, city, radius and even by household demographic information.

 

Data to Improve Your Website & Organic Search Results

You obtain a lot of data when you run a paid search marketing campaign, which is used to constantly improve the campaign itself. In addition to this, there is a lot of data that you can use to improve your website and organic results as well.

One of the easiest things your practice can do is take top-performing ad copy and carry that messaging over to your website’s title tags and meta descriptions.

Your title tag and meta description are basically ad copy for your organic search results. By having more impactful messaging in your organic search results, you will get more clicks, leading to more website visits and finally more patients into your practice.

Paid Search Ad

hearing aid paid search marketing ad

Organic Search Result

You can also take top-performing ad copy and add it to your website page headlines to provide more compelling calls to action and content that you know your targeted audience will respond to.

 

Spy on Your Competitors

When you are running a paid search campaign, you can actually see the local practices and national brands that are directly competing with you in your targeted markets.

With this information, you can visit your competitors’ websites and see what messaging they use, what offers they have, how their site is structured, and the services they offer. Your competitors actually can (though it may be hard to admit) provide you with some great marketing ideas for your website.

Another tool is the “ad preview tool,” which is available within the AdWords platform.

With this tool, you can get a decent sense of the ad copy competitors are using for the keywords you are also bidding on.

Note: One thing we recommend you not do, when checking out your competition, is actually searching for keywords you are bidding on, as this can potentially decrease the performance of your campaign.

 

Mobile (Have You Seen a Mobile Search Result Lately?)

More and more of your prospects are searching for the services your practice offers on mobile devices. As this is happening, Google is making paid search ads more prominent than ever. These days, you can have shopping ads at the very top, then paid search ads, and finally the local map pack results below all that.

There is only so much real estate on mobile search results pages, and as the paid search mobile trend continues, it is going to be more important than ever for your practice to have a strong foothold in the paid search landscape.

 

Protect Your Brand

On quite a few occasions, we’ve seen competitors actually bid on the brand name of a practice we are working with.

If you are not doing paid search when this happens, you might be losing patients to other practices. We typically will bid on the practice name we are running the campaign for, so that we control the messaging and ensure we are there if competitors are encroaching in our space.

 

Consistent Search Presence

Having a strong SEO strategy is critical for your practice, but organic search can be inconsistent. There are no guarantees where you will be ranked in search results, because search engines are always changing their ranking factors, which can severely affect where you fall.

Paid search marketing can help ensure your practice always has a consistent presence in search results, because you are directly choosing the keywords and search terms you want to target. Essentially, with paid search, you are in almost complete control of where and when your ads show up.

 

Opening a New Location?

If you are opening a new location or moving your practice to a new city, paid search marketing can provide instant search presence. With organic search, it takes time to build rankings when you are moving into a new city, and you are having to compete with practices that have already obtained a strong search presence in that new city. With paid search, you can target specific locations you want to reach with your ads.

In conclusion, when you are considering paid search marketing for your practice, it is important to consider all the perks and not just the benefit of getting new leads for your practice. If you have any questions about paid search marketing or want to learn more about the benefits that paid search can offer your practice, please contact our team today.