SEO or Paid Ads?
Online marketing isn’t easy. There are many ways to promote your dental practice online: in paid ads, in organic listings, in social media – but what should you be doing to help promote your business online?
Firstly, we need to start with your goals. What do you want to achieve online? Most clients want to achieve more enquiries. However, are there specific treatments you are trying to gain more enquiries for? Are you trying to promote your practice or treatments outside of your physical location?
Secondly, we need to understand your budget. Every business tries keeping their spending as low as possible. However, as the majority of people search online for a dental practice, it is important to make your business is as competitive as possible online. If your goal is to rank on page 1 or maintain your position in a highly competitive location, it would likely require a reasonable amount of investment to achieve this.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of maximising your website’s presence for search terms. It involves optimising the website itself (on-page SEO) and creating/building mentions of the practice, and its website, elsewhere on the web (off-page SEO). The level of competition in your area, and how your website is already performing, will indicate the level of SEO your website may need. It is wise to always be carrying out some form of SEO on a regular basis, even if you have reached the position you wanted, as your competition is probably working hard on outranking you.
SEO is normally the first online marketing activity clients opt for. SEO is great for improving your rankings in your physical location, and for generating free traffic to your website, but when it comes to promoting your practice outside your physical location, Pay-per-click (PPC) is best used.
Pay-per-click (PPC) or Google ads is used to help promote your practice and/or treatments in Google. Each time a user clicks on your ad, you are charged – hence the term pay-per-click. Many clients worry about using pay-per-click as part of their overall online marketing strategy, but the return on investment that can be generated from this form of marketing can be quite high. In addition to this, pay-per-click marketing is highly targeted and measureable unlike other forms of traditional marketing.
As mentioned above, PPC is useful in promoting the practice and/or treatments outside of your physical location. PPC is also useful at promoting your practice and/or treatments in your physical location as well, especially if your practice website is struggling with its organic rankings.
If your practice is completely new to SEO, or you have been struggling with your rankings, a combination of SEO and PPC will certainly help. SEO can take time before you start to see results, and whilst the SEO work is being carried out it is best to use PPC to promote your website on the first page of Google.
SEO and PPC go hand-in-hand when it comes to online marketing. Both are used to help your online presence, brand awareness, conversions and traffic from searches made and to maximise your results, the best online strategy makes use of both SEO and PPC.
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